The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 17 Dec 2024The last UN forces still in the northern half of Korea begin their frantic retreat by sea. The evacuation is a huge operation involving over 100,000 men, and needs to go off smoothly if the UN want any hope of halting the Chinese advance. Eighth Army, who spend this week retreating, are certainly not up to the task on their own.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:07 Failures of Command
05:36 Hungnam Evacuation
09:02 Eighth Army Situation
13:07 National Emergency
14:12 Conclusion
15:48 CTA
(more…)
December 18, 2024
The Korean War 026 – Chinese Victory in North Korea Complete – December 17, 1950
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The modern Furies
In Greek mythology, the Erinyes (the Furies) — euphemized as the Eumenides (the “Gracious ones”) were the goddesses of vengeance. You may dismiss the ancient Greeks and their beliefs, yet they often encapsulate hidden wisdom for those who know how to interpret their stories. Today, as Janice Fiamengo points out, we have no need for mythological Furies, as they’re frequently embodied in otherwise ordinary women:
The Remorse of Orestes or Orestes Pursued by the Furies
Oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862, in the Chrysler Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons.
Feminist uproar over Trump’s election was easy to predict, and not long in coming. Within ten days of the election, Clara Jeffery wrote in Mother Jones that “Women are furious — in a Greek mythology sort of way“. Taking examples from TikTok, Jeffery chronicled abundant “sorrow, disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage”, which many women vowed to exorcise on men: “‘If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue‘”, she quoted one.
In The New York Times, a 16-year-old girl, Naomi Beinart, charted her tumultuous emotions, which included a sense of betrayal because her male classmates had carried on with their lives on the day after the election, seemingly immune to the girls’ all-pervasive gloom and outrage. “Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. We don’t even share the same future,” Beinart opined melodramatically.
No one with even a minimal acquaintance with social media can have missed the many similar, raging reactions: the heads being shaved, the death threats, the promised sex strikes, the fantasies of revenge against Trump-voting husbands. We are to understand that the re-election of a man rumored to lack sufficient pro-abortion commitment justifies thousands of self-recorded screams, imprecations, and poisoning plots.
At least one group of women gathered physically in Wisconsin to shout their angst and anger at Lake Michigan, and there have already been tentative (though apparently less enthusiastic than formerly) plans for a revival of the anti-Trump Women’s March protests, in which women with vulgar placards and pink hats exhibited their “collective rage“.
Women’s rage is all the rage.
It is not enough, it seems, for these women to say that they are disappointed by Trump’s win, and certainly inadequate for them to state strong disagreement with his policies or style. Expressing evidence-based positions is the sort of thing a rational person would do, and significant groups of women appear increasingly uninterested in rational talk or behavior. Instead, they reach for the most extreme language, tone of voice, postures and actions to express what feminist journalist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett called the “visceral” “body horror” produced by the Trump victory, including the “profound physical revulsion” Cosslett and many of her sisters allegedly feel simply as a result of seeing one of Trump’s tweets (talk about fragility!).
Like so many feminist pundits telling us of women’s “horror” and “fury“, the emphasis is squarely on feeling and the female body, as if to bypass the intellect and the will altogether. The idea some feminists once scorned — that women are less reasonable and self-controlled than men — seems to have become a feminist axiom.
[NR: Edited to fix the broken URL.]
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QotD: Western shaming – the grass is always greener overseas
In the late 1950s, many elites in the United States bought the Soviet Union line that the march of global communism would “bury” the West. Then, as Soviet power eroded in the 1980s, Japan Inc. and its ascendant model of state-sponsored industry became the preferred alternative to Western-style democratic capitalism.
Once Japan’s economy ossified, the new utopia of the 1990s was supposedly the emerging European Union. Americans were supposed to be awed that the euro gained ground on the dollar. Europe’s borderless democratic socialism and its “soft power” were declared preferable to the reactionary U.S.
By 2015, the EU was a mess, so China was preordained as the inevitable global superpower. American intellectuals pointed to its high-speed rail transportation, solar industries and gleaming airports, in contrast to the hollowed-out and grubby American heartland.
Now the curtain has been pulled back on the interior rot of the Chinese Communist Party, its gulag-like re-education camps, its systematic mercantile cheating, its Orwellian surveillance apparatus, its serial public health crises and its primitive hinterland infrastructure.
After the calcification of the Soviet Union, Japan Inc., the EU and the Chinese superpower, no one quite knows which alternative will next supposedly bury America.
Victor Davis Hanson, “The Cult of Western Shaming”, Townhall.com, 2020-01-29.
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December 15, 2024
Cooking on the American Homefront During WWII
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Aug 6, 2024T-bone shaped seasoned ground beef with Wheaties
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1943Rationing didn’t begin in the United States until May 1942, and in order to buy certain foods, you used a combination of stamps and money. Better cuts of meat required more stamps, so there came a slew of recipes that either replaced meat, or made lesser cuts seem like better ones, like this recipe.
This “emergency steak” is actually very nice. It’s essentially a kind of meatloaf, and is surprisingly flavorful given the scant ingredient list. Is it like a T-bone steak? No. Is it tasty? Yes.
Emergency Steak
(1 lb.—serves 6)
Mix …
1 lb. ground beef or hamburger
1/2 cup milk
1 cup WHEATIES
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. pepper
1 tbsp. chopped onion
Place on pan, pat into T-bone steak shape, 1 in. thick. Broil 8 to 15 min. at 500° (very hot). Turn once.
Meats … 7
— Your Share by Betty Crocker (General Mills), 1943
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QotD: Elite luxury beliefs – cultivated non-disgust
But now they’ve moved on to the kids. It is easy to believe a listless, drug-addled elite might indulge in sexual degeneracy just for the hell of it. But how do we explain kindergarten teachers teaching their pupils about pronouns? Doctors emotionally blackmailing parents by insisting that the alternative to mutilating their children is their suicides? Or civil servants quietly putting gender-neutral bathrooms in public spaces?
How do we explain any of this? How do we even explain the emergence of transgenderism at all? There have been transexuals and gender dysphorics throughout history. They were typically understood as an offshoot of homosexuality, the extreme end of the effeminacy spectrum, and a vanishingly small fraction of the population.
But the current contagion is unusual and is clearly artificial. Its scale can only be a result of active promotion. Much of that is accomplished via the media and fellow travellers who champion these activities. But it is helped along by a collection of other professionals, and any attempt to question it is met with energetic pushback.
It is apparent that much of this comes from on-high, a literal top-down initiative. In less than twenty years we have witnessed a journey that began with gay rights and now includes active promotion of sexual deviancy to children, none of it natural or wanted by the majority. There is lots of speculation as to why this may be, including the part it may play in a comprehensive depopulation agenda.
What is apparent is that the professional class who endorse and promote this perceive it as an exercise in tolerance.
The notion of tolerance has typically been invoked for the distasteful, a last line of defence when direct measures fail, not a behavioural response indicating sophistication.
We rely on tolerance for things we dislike but cannot avoid. We learn to tolerate a persistent whine from an air conditioning unit, a noisy neighbour, or a noxious smell. But our goal is always to remove the source of the problem. Tolerance is a stopgap only when more permanent solutions are absent.
Their belief that tolerance is a virtue is one of the greatest shortcomings of today’s chattering classes. It is exactly the kind of signal error that exemplifies the disconnect between globalist elites and their obedient cheerleaders. The mechanism here seems to be a kind of learned override to natural disgust or discomfort. When others then object to whatever letter they have just added to the LGBTQWERTY+ community on the basis that it can’t be healthy or normal to endorse this stuff, that learned response includes the flare of superiority at your obvious backwardness.
How satisfying it must feel to have your natural inclination toward superiority endorsed in this way. Like whole food vegans at a Medieval banquet, it must provide an irresistible sense of smugness to know that you are the one-eyed man in the rainbow-decked land of the blind, with the uneducated hopelessly lost in their backward understanding of the benefits of sexual liberation.
While elites and their public relations machine happily endorse this misplaced emphasis on tolerance, all evidence suggests the elites themselves are not tolerating anything, despite what their obedient minions may think. They really are indulging in the cocaine-fuelled all-star human sacrifice orgies for real because they are cosmically bored and rich.
They aren’t rising above intrinsic disgust responses, they have sexualized them. They seem to have fetishized everything we consider unacceptable. Trafficked kids, femboys, chicks with dicks, gangbangs, farmyard orgies, human sacrifice, the lot.
They may even experience a thrill in seeing just how far they can push public morality as many have suggested, and especially how far they can get otherwise normal middle-class people to champion deviancy and hedonism most cultures find distasteful enough to ban.
The excessive promotion of tolerance is a defence against unnatural practices bored elites are rumoured to engage in. The professional class, for all their faults, probably aren’t into human sacrifice or animal orgies. So their response is to elevate the importance of visible acceptance of alternative lifestyles, hence gay kids, castrated boys, invented genders and other absurdities they cannot possibly believe themselves, and all of it instantly conveyed to one’s peers with nothing more than a multicoloured flag.
To top it all when they see how normals react, those unmoved by inept calls to be more understanding about sexual abuse, when they see parents reach for the shotgun at the very idea of sexually mutilating children, they get to invoke the conjoined twin of their cultivated tolerance, namely artificial superiority. The deep belief that they see further than the yokels with their primitive instinct to actually protect the vulnerable and embrace some basic sense of public morality.
These absurd beliefs can be observed in our educated classes because they ostentatiously demonstrate tolerance and its newfound position as the supreme virtue of the post-Christian age, one of the most successful public relations campaigns ever run by elites.
Spaceman Spiff (guest-post) “Praying to Absent Gods”, Postcards from Barsoom, 2024-07-16.
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December 14, 2024
Matt Gurney’s final thoughts from the Halifax International Security Forum
One of the things I regret about being totally broke is that I can’t pay for a full subscription to The Line, which is one of Canada’s best sources of (relatively) unbiased commentary on current events both in Canada and around the world. This is the third instalment of Matt Gurney’s report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum (earlier parts linked here and here):
This next one is going to be very brief, since it’s really just an observation. There was very little discussion of Israel. As I noted at the top, there was discussion of the situation in the Middle East. But it was mostly in the context of “The world is currently a mess”. Parts of the Forum involve breaking into smaller groups for more focused discussion on specific issues, and some of those might have focused on Israel or the Middle East more broadly. I can’t speak to what I didn’t see. But I was surprised by a relative lack of focus on the ongoing fighting around Israel in the main events.
A notable exception was the presence of Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy on one of the on-record panels. An international law expert, she has spent the months since the October 7th attacks documenting the mass sexual violence that was such an awful feature of Hamas’s attack. Her comments were brief but powerful and can be seen here starting at around the nine-minute mark. I’d like to zoom in on one comment in particular. Dr. Elkayam-Levy told the audience how the invaders were able to capture the personal devices of many of their victims, and use those devices to broadcast the abuse and sometimes murder of these victims via the victims’ own social media apps. This was something that was discussed shortly after the October 7 attacks but not much after: by seizing the victims’ phones, the invaders were able to spread terror and traumatize the loved ones of the victims by showing their friends and family, via photos and videos and live streams, exactly what the victims were being made to suffer.
“I thought I had seen the worst,” the doctor told the assembled audience. “But really, if there is hell, this is what it looks like. Someone abusing your kin. Someone killing your loved ones in front of your eyes.”
Though it was only a small part of the official agenda, Dr. Elkayam-Levy’s comments left an outsized impression on me, and I suspect on many others.
He also discussed his own professional path which he regrets didn’t include a lot of traditional on-the-spot reporting on tragedies and interviewing survivors, as he feels he doesn’t have a good “game face” for those times when he now finds himself doing that kind of work:
I am 100 per cent on side with Ukraine in its war with Russia. I’m not blind to flaws in Ukraine today or in Ukraine’s history, but I have absolutely no doubt who’s the good guy and the bad guy in that ongoing war. I’ve had wonderful opportunities to speak with many Ukrainians since their country was invaded. I have heard their stories and tried to share them on my platforms. I’ve also had opportunities to meet and talk to many Ukrainians who are living now in my own hometown, mostly women with young children, who fled the fighting or once lived in parts of the country that are now occupied by Russia.
I feel so profoundly that these people have been wronged, and tremendously wronged. I believe so sincerely that they should have our full backing as they try and drive back the invaders and liberate their country. That their cause is not just in the West’s strategic interests, and I very much think that it is, but also that it is morally just.
But I have concluded that they’re screwed. We’ve lost interest, and Ukrainians are about to get the Kurd treatment, if I can be so crass. And I just didn’t have the heart to tell them that. I don’t even know how I’d begin to say that to them. I write and speak for a living. And words still failed me.
During a meal in Halifax, a woman who’d flown in to give a presentation on the work her organization does in Ukraine assisting displaced people told me a story of her own experience with the war. The original Russian invasion in 2014 hadn’t been anywhere near where she lived. She was somewhat shocked, she told me, when in 2022, her hometown came under attack. She described the first time she heard air raid sirens. The first time she heard a bomb blast. The first time she could hear the gunfire of advancing ground troops. She told me about the first person from her small community to die, a paramedic who was on her way to collect wounded when their ambulance was hit. And then she told me how, months later, she realized she couldn’t remember any of those things anymore, except for the first time, because they’d happened so much. Constant sirens. Constant bombings. Constant gunfire. The deaths of more people she personally knew than she could even remember.
And as she told me this story, I found myself near tears. I was able to cover it up, I think. I wish I had better game face, but I have some. But my tears weren’t even of sympathy. I wasn’t overwhelmed by her sad story, though it was awfully goddamned sad. No, the tears I felt were tears of shame. I knew that at the end of the conference, I’d get to go home. Toronto is a bit rougher than it was when I was growing up, but it ain’t a war zone.
This woman doesn’t get to go home, assuming her home is even still standing. She knew it, I think. I knew it. I think we both knew that the other knew. But we talked around it.
History is going to judge us harshly for our failure to do more, faster, to help Ukrainians defend themselves.
And alas, we’ll deserve it.
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Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence
To the left, Gabbard is widely criticized as some sort of Russian pawn, while to many on the right she’s unacceptable as a former Democrat and “girlboss”. Despite this, J.D. Tuccille says President-elect Donald Trump seems quite confident that she’s the right person for the job:
Tulsi Gabbard speaks at the “People’s Rally” in Washington DC on 17 November, 2016.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.
United States President-elect Donald Trump is standing behind Tulsi Gabbard, his pick to be director of national intelligence. Like several of Trump’s nominees, former Democratic congresswoman Gabbard is controversial in D.C.-insider circles, and understandably so; she’s skeptical of the political establishment, often criticizes foreign policy and was apparently subject to surveillance and put on a terrorist watch list because of her dissident ways. In other words, she’s a rather promising nominee for an incoming administration that wants to completely revamp government institutions that desperately need reform.
Asked this week by NBC’s Kristen Welker if he has confidence in Gabbard despite objections raised in certain circles to her past actions and positions, Trump responded, “I do. I mean, she’s a very respected person.”
Trump was specifically asked about two meetings Gabbard had in 2017 with then-Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Now in exile, al-Assad and his relationships with American politicians shouldn’t be much of a worry anymore, but he plays a part in the official panic over Gabbard’s views on foreign policy.
In 2019, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton famously called Gabbard a “Russian asset“. Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq war, aroused Clinton’s ire with her anti-interventionism in foreign policy matters and criticism of the political establishment and its hawkishness during the course of a short-lived campaign for her party’s presidential nomination.
“There are brutal dictators in the world. Assad of Syria is one of them. That does not mean the U.S. should be waging regime-change wars around the world,” Gabbard told CNN in early 2019. Her long-standing fears of Islamist extremism led her to consider al-Assad a less-bad alternative to a potential fundamentalist regime.
Gabbard returned Clinton’s slight by calling her “the queen of warmongers” and the “embodiment of corruption”. It’s unsurprising that the two no longer share a political party.
Gabbard’s dissent from establishment orthodoxy doesn’t stop at military matters. In 2020, she joined with libertarian-leaning Republican Thomas Massie, from Kentucky, to call on the U.S. government to cease its persecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange ran afoul of the U.S. government when he published leaked documents revealing embarrassing details about official misconduct in Iraq and elsewhere.
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Explaining the collapse in North American birth rates
The demographic collapse of both Canadian and American birthrates has many causes, but kulak definitely identifies a major one here:
📜Antidiscrimination law is the reason for the Birthrate Collapse.
In North America, for a guy to marry a girl, it’s basically expected that he must make enough more than her that he can pay for himself and support her while she provides for kids, without a decline in her lifestyle… and his status, quality of wife, and whether the marriage will be rocky or happy is determined by whether or not he can actually materially IMPROVE her lifestyle over unmarried life. Which was very achievable in the 50s and 60s when women were paid poorly and largely couldn’t get high status complex careers, and didn’t want to have to, and couldn’t, compete to male standards…
Whereas after antidiscrimination laws it is MANDATED 30-50% of high paying jobs must go to to women, no matter how many more hours men put in, or how less productive the women are. Ie. It is literally legally impossible for the average man to earn more than the average woman, no matter how hard or effectively he works… and because he WILL work harder to try, and because he competing against other men who are working harder to compete for the few high status jobs men can get, Men across the board are effectively POORER than women, they are doing way more work for equal or less pay and status.
It’s a meme now that girls will goof off at office jobs doing tik toks while the male workers are stressed and annoyed in the corner trying to keep the business afloat for the same pay. As such those girls won’t even date those men… because if you have to be stressed at the job for the same pay, you naturally seem poorer.
This is why western marriage and birthrates are collapsing.
And a follow-up response to another comment:
THis leads to spoiled delusional women convinced men are useless on the one hand, and the few self-aware women having to medicate to overcome their “imposter syndrome” as they subconsciously know they’re dead weight which psychologically breaks them.
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December 13, 2024
Modern (western) armies never seem to have enough infantry, no matter how high-tech the battlefield gets
Over the last century, one of the apparent constants in military doctrine has been that the latest and greatest technical innovation has somehow eclipsed the importance of boring old infantry units. Tanks were the future! No, tactical airpower was the future! No, nuclear weapons were the future! No, airmobile and helicopter units were the future! No, drones are the future! Yet every time the guns started firing, the limiting factor always seemed to be “not enough infantry” (at least among western militaries). You definitely needed more specialist and support units to handle the latest whizzy toys being deployed, yet it was still the infantry who mattered in the end. That’s just me noodling … it’s only loosely related to the rest of the post.
In my weekly recommendations list from Substack, they included this post from Bazaar of War which discusses the changes in organization of tactical and operation level units over time to best meet the needs of the modern battlefield:
Command post for a single battalion-sized element in a brigade combat team.
Photo by Sgt Anita Stratton, US Army.
Modern ground forces are torn between two competing demands, for infantry and for enablers. Urban operations and large-scale combat over the past decade demonstrate that infantry remains just as essential as ever. Yet that same infantry needs a lot of low-level support just to survive and remain effective: drone operators, EW, and engineers, not to mention armor and artillery. This poses an obvious dilemma for force management—not least when faced with competing demands for air, naval, and missile assets—but also raises questions about force structure.
Organizing the Force
One of the key decisions in how future wars will be fought is what will be the primary tactical unit. Inevitably, certain command levels are much more important than others: those which require greater freedom from higher headquarters than they allow their own subordinates. This partly comes down to a question of where the combined-arms fight is best coordinated, which in turn depends heavily on technology.
This has varied a lot over time. The main tactical formation of the Napoleonic army was the corps, which had organic artillery, cavalry, and engineers that allowed it to fight independent actions with a versatility not available to smaller units. The Western Front of World War II was a war of divisions at the tactical level and armies at the operational, a pattern which continued through the Cold War. The US Army shifted to a brigade model during the GWOT era, on the assumption that future deployments would be smaller scale and lower intensity; only recently has it made the decision to return to a divisional model. Russia also switched to a brigade model around this time, although more for cost and manpower reasons.
Tweaking the Hierarchy
At the same time, certain echelons have disappeared altogether. The subdivisions of Western armies reached their greatest extent in World War I, as new ones were added at the extremities of the model standardized during the French Revolution: fireteams/squads to execute trench raids, army groups to manage large sections of the front. At the same time, cuts were made around the middle. Machine guns were pushed from the regimental level down to battalions over the course of the war, reducing the number of these bulkier regiments in a division; this accordingly eliminated the need for brigades as a tactical unit.
This continued with the next major war. More organic supporting arms and increased mobility made combat more dispersed, creating the need for supply, communications, intelligence, and medical support at lower levels. As units at each echelon grew fatter, it became too cumbersome to have six separate headquarters from battalion to field army. Midway through World War II, the Soviets followed the Western example of eliminating brigades, and got rid of corps to boot (excepting ad-hoc and specialized formations). During the Cold War, the increasing use of combined arms at a lower level caused most NATO militaries to eliminate the regiment/brigade distinction altogether: the majority favored the larger brigade, which could receive supporting units to fight as a brigade combat team, although the US Marines retained regiments as brigades in all but name (the French, by contrast, got rid of most of their battalions, preferring regiments formed of many companies).
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December 12, 2024
CHEVROLET with Cartoonist Rube Goldberg: Something for Nothing (1940)
Charlie Dean Archives
Published Aug 27, 2013Cartoonist Rube Goldberg creates a little animation to explain how fuel is converted to power in the modern automobile engine.
CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!
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December 11, 2024
The Korean War 025 – UN Forces Abandon Pyongyang – December 10, 1950
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 10 Dec 2024This week, UN forces in the west pull out of the North Korean capital Pyongyang. In the east, the marines continue to fight their way towards safety. Over in Washington, the aftershocks of the Chinese intervention have shaken high command as much as they have the troops on the ground, and America’s allies, especially Britain, grow alarmed over the US response.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:26 Recap
01:20 The Blame Game
03:58 Retreat in the West
07:43 The Chinese Situation
10:59 Escaping Chosin
13:57 Atoms and Attlees
18:07 Summary
18:20 Conclusion
(more…)
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December 10, 2024
M47 – The Most Boring Tank Ever? | Tank Chat #178
The Tank Museum
Published Aug 9, 2024The US built M47 probably isn’t the most interesting tank in history – but it was a vital part of NATO’s Cold War tank force.
Rushed into production at the outbreak of the Korean War, it never saw active service with the US military and was quickly superseded by the M48.
But large numbers were supplied to US Allies around the world – with Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Jordan, Pakistan and Austria being among the most significant users.
Probably the most famous M47 crewman of all, Arnold Schwarzenegger, served on the tank during his National Service.
00:00 | Intro
01:05 | M46 Sees Service in Korea
02:56 | Development Problems – And a Stop Gap
10:57 | Short Lived US service
12:47 | But An Export Success
15:24 | M47 plugs the gap for the US Army – goes on to serve abroad
15:46 | The Tank Museum’s M47 Restoration Project
(more…)
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QotD: Nuclear deterrence and the start of the Cold War
It’s important, I think, for us to be clear-eyed here about what the USSR was during the Cold War – while the USSR made opportunistic use of anti-imperialist rhetoric against western powers (which were, it must be noted, also imperial powers), the Soviet Union was also very clearly an empire. Indeed, it was an empire of a very traditional kind, in which a core demographic (ethnic Russians were substantially over-represented in central leadership) led by an imperial elite (Communist party members) extracted resources, labor and manpower from a politically subordinated periphery (both the other Soviet Socialist Republics that composed the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries) for the benefit of the imperial elite and the core. While the USSR presented itself as notionally federal in nature, it was in fact extremely centralized and dominated by a relatively small elite.
So when Western planners planned based on fears that the highly militarized expansionist territorial empire openly committed to an expansionist ideology and actively trying to lever out opposing governments from central (not eastern) Europe might try to expand further, they weren’t simply imagining things. This is not to say everything they did in response was wise, moral or legal; much of it wasn’t. There is a certain sort of childish error which assumes that because the “West” did some unsavory things during the Cold War, that means that the threat of the Soviet Union wasn’t real; we must put away such childish things. The fear had a very real basis.
Direct military action against the USSR with conventional forces was both politically unacceptable even before the USSR tested its first nuclear weapons – voters in Britain, France or the United States did not want another world war; two was quite enough – and also militarily impossible as Soviet forces in Europe substantially outnumbered their Western opponents. Soviet leaders, by contrast, were not nearly so constrained by public opinion (as shown by their strategic decision to limit demobilization, something the democracies simply couldn’t do).
This context – a west (soon to be NATO) that is working from the assumption that the USSR is expansionist (which it was) and that western forces would be weaker than Soviet forces in conventional warfare (which they were) – provides the foundation for how deterrence theory would develop.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.
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December 9, 2024
“Take the lecture, America. This person is tired of you being so weird all the time”
Chris Bray checks in on the vocational mental health clinic known as the New York Times:
Non-binary New York Times op-ed writer M Gessen
A cruel government official absolutely brutalized and devastated some journalists this week, in a horrifying showdown that the New York Times op-ed writer M Gessen bravely describes this morning:
Shortly before allowing reporters into the main chamber of the Supreme Court for oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a court employee asked us all if we needed to use a bathroom. The men’s room was right next door, the staff member said, and the women’s room down the hall.
“Where should nonbinary people go?” one of the reporters asked.
An uncomfortable back-and-forth followed. The staff person seemed not to understand the question. In the end, there was no answer. It just didn’t seem to compute.
The men’s room is over there, the Nazi said, not even seeing what a vicious act this was.
This is the lede; given the richest real estate in journalism, Gessen opens a discussion of a Supreme Court case with the story of victims denied the right to drop a deuce in a manner that fully provides them with the rich tapestry of social equity. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it apparently bends toward just using a gendered toilet stall to wipe your ass. The piece goes on the warn about the American descent into Trumpian autocracy, in case you hadn’t guessed.
After an election season in which Tim Walz, of all people, was sent out to sell the narrative that JD Vance, of all people, was deeply weird and socially marginal, I constantly find myself seeing representations of strangeness and darkness and cruelty and horror that make me … shrug? “Which part is the bad part?”
I mentioned this yesterday, but I’m fixating this morning on the journalist who just crushed Pete Hegseth, just absolutely caught his ass, dead to rights, and bragged that she had the receipts. Mic drop, bitch — she got you! Your deviant behavior is on video. And then you watch the video, and it’s some way-obvious dads drinking a glass of whiskey together, obviously sober and acting with restraint, in a dead-center normal piece of social behavior.
This happens daily. HERE IS A SCARY WEIRD THING, a headline says, and I click on the link and see an unremarkable thing. The nonbinary journalist M Gessen is deeply concerned that the Supreme Court building is operated in such a bizarre way, consistent with a brutal descent into autocracy, not the socially reasonable way in which a diverse regime of toilet facilities are aligned with the infinite number of possible ways to represent your relationship to your crotch. M Gessen.
Take the lecture, America. This person is tired of you being so weird all the time.
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“… liberalism has become a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses”
Freddie deBoer patiently explains why outrageous over-the-top emoting isn’t a useful or productive way to argue for your political views:
I’ve written several times about the phenomenon of adolescent women on TikTok pretending to have dissociative identity disorder for social media clout and attention. I’ve focused on it not because I necessarily think the issue itself is particularly important, but rather because it’s so emblematic of what liberalism has become: a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses, a collection of well-intentioned people who mistake the responsibility to fight discrimination for a broad, vague duty to shield certain groups of people from any criticism.
For the book I’m currently writing, I’m talking to a ton of people in the broad world of mental health — psychiatrists, therapists, researchers, policymakers, journalists, fellow patients — and I’ve brought up the TikTok DID community over and over again. Remarkably, not one person defends the phenomenon as a true expression of genuine illness, not even a few disability rights activists I’ve talked to, who usually have an ethic of never questioning a disability claim. Countless normie liberals I’ve chatter with, over the past several years, have also accepted my basic position that these young women don’t actually have dissociative identity disorder. But, also, almost no one is willing to affirmatively say anything about this dynamic themselves. Indeed, The Verge reported that many experts have decided that the costs of speaking out about that whole culture just aren’t worth it. And so you have a set of behaviors that no one defends but that no one feels comfortable criticizing, thanks to the pathologies of 21st century liberalism and online rage. That’s what I’m really here to talk to you about today.
I don’t, of course, want to be too harsh on the individual young women who have turned a debilitating and controversial disorder into an opportunity to put on vertical video fashion shows; they’re just kids and kids do stupid shit, sometimes even genuinely offensive shit. What you usually have, or used to have, is the ability to tell someone doing stupid shit to knock it off. Not oppress anyone, not humiliate anyone, not permanently shun anyone. But just to say, “You don’t have dissociative identity disorder, pretending you do is unhealthy and offensive towards people who actually have serious mental illnesses, knock it off“. I find that very easy to say. But clearly a lot of people don’t, and the reasons are fairly obvious. First, despite whatever vibe shift we may be living through, it remains the case that in progressive discursive spaces, saying the wrong thing is still very fraught and can result in accusations of bigotry that are personally and professionally damaging. Second, liberals have trained themselves to avoid any position at all that might be construed as siding with the enemy, as a matter of in-group identification. Take it from me: “A lot of people in Gen Z appear to be lacking in emotional resilience, in a way that’s unhealthy for them” has become, in the internet-soaked mind, “Gen Z is a bunch of snowflakes”, and so a ton of liberals recoil at that idea. Can’t appear to make a concession to the enemy! I’m afraid we do not have a vocabulary for critical solidarity anymore.
All of this is bad, and you only have to look at how incredibly harsh certain slices of “queer fandom” can be to see what I’m talking about.
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