Quotulatiousness

March 7, 2025

Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century, part 2

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

In The Conservative Woman, N.S. Lyons continues his essay contending that the arrival of Donald Trump, version 2.0, may finally end the era we’ve been living in since immediately after the end of WW2:

The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind. That this would be a weak, passionless, undemocratic, intricately micromanaged world of technocratic rationalism was a sacrifice the post-war consensus was willing to make.

That dream didn’t work out, though, because the “strong gods” refused to die.

Mary Harrington recently observed that the Trumpian revolution seems as much archetypal as political, noting that the generally “exultant male response to recent work by Elon Musk and his ‘warband’ of young tech-bros” in dismantling the entrenched bureaucracy is a reflection of what can be “understood archetypally as [their] doing battle against a vast, miasmic foe whose aim is the destruction of masculine heroism as such”. This masculine-inflected spirit was suppressed throughout the Long Twentieth Century, but now it’s back. And it wasn’t, she notes, “as though a proceduralist, managerial civilization affords no scope for horrors of its own”. Thus now “we’re watching in real time as figures such as the hero, the king, the warrior, and the pirate; or indeed various types of antihero, all make their return to the public sphere”.

Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management. Unsurprisingly, this led to nation-states and a broader civilization that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. In short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world.

But, as reality began to intrude over the past two decades, the share of people still convinced by the hazy promises of the open society steadily diminished. A reaction began to brew, especially among those most divorced from and harmed by its aging obsessions: the young and the working class. The “populism” that is now sweeping the West is best understood as a democratic insistence on the restoration and reintegration of respect for those strong gods capable of grounding, uniting and sustaining societies, including coherent national identities, cohesive natural loyalties, and the recognition of objective and transcendent truths.

Today’s populism is more than just a reaction against decades of elite betrayal and terrible governance (though it is that too); it is a deep, suppressed desire for long-delayed action, to break free from the smothering lethargy imposed by proceduralist managerialism and fight passionately for collective survival and self-interest. It is the return of the political to politics. This demands a restoration of old virtues, including a vital sense of national and civilizational self-worth. And that in turn requires a rejection of the pathological “tyranny of guilt” (as the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner dubbed it) that has gripped the Western mind since 1945. As the power of endless hysterical accusations of “fascism” has gradually faded, we have – for better and worse – begun to witness the end of the Age of Hitler.

“The Resistance” achieves lame nirvana

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

President Donald Trump is a boisterous, noisy distraction in so many ways and rubs a heck of a lot of people the wrong way in everything he does … and yet the politicians who oppose him seem to be engaged in a scientific experiment to discover just how cringeworthy they can be:

“REMINDER: It Is Offensive And Possibly Illegal To Photoshop Anything On These Democrats’ Signs That Would Make Them Look Foolish.
The Babylon Bee, https://x.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1897140039777239181/photo/1

Remember when the phrase “the Resistance” would conjure up visions of sexy French youths in berets battling actual Nazis? Now all it brings to mind is ageing dullards in pink suits holding up signs saying “This is not normal” while sporting the most turbo-smug look on their faces. As US president Donald Trump spoke to a joint session of Congress last night, “across the aisle the Resistance was stirring”, gushed the Guardian‘s DC reporter. His piece was illustrated with a pic of some congresswoman in pearls and a balding Democrat looking aghast as Trump talked. Seriously, if this is “the Resistance”, the world’s tyrants can rest easy.

Yesterday’s “Democrat fightback” and “resistance to Trump’s rhetoric” – journalists are literally calling it that – was next-level cringe. It occurred during Trump’s 100-minute speech, the longest Congress talk in 60 years. As Trump bashed Joe Biden and bigged up Elon Musk, the Dems came over all soixante-huitard. Fury coursed through their ranks. Then the revolt started. The Squad’s Rashida Tlaib held up a scrawled sign saying “That’s a lie!”. Dem representative Al Green “shook his cane and pointed his finger” and cried “You have no mandate” to cut Medicaid. How the regime must have quaked at the sight of this revolution!

The way some hacks are talking about this tantrum masquerading as a protest you’d think it was a modern-day storming of the Bastille. The Dems’ “stirring” acts of rebellion will have “given hope to the Resistance” and sent a message to “the world”, said the Guardian. Nurse! Even leftists who’ve been disappointed with the Dem establishment seemed to get a moral kick from this political pantomime. So far, the “resistance” to the Trumpist tyranny has been “splintered”, but now we know it’s “getting better”, fawned Vox. Perhaps, it said, we’ll soon see the “aggressive resistance” we really need.

Can these people hear themselves? Overpaid politicians holding up mass-produced black placards with hackneyed complaints like “False” and “Liar” are not “the Resistance” – they’re the establishment cosplaying as campus radicals for likes and headlines. In one especially squirming scene, some Dems “removed their outer business wear” to reveal black t-shirts with the word “RESIST” in “bold white letters”. Their delusions of radicalism are off the scale. Resistance is when young Iranian women rip off their hijabs or Kurdish revolutionaries fight the neo-fascists of ISIS, not when politicians on $174,000 a year put on a t-shirt their stressed intern ordered from some hip printer on 7th Street.

Bricking the internet

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Phil A. McBride explains how the “net giants” have steadily nibbled away at the built-in resilience of the original internet design so that we’re all far more vulnerable to network outages than ever before:

The Internet was originally conceived in the 1960s to be a resilient, disparate and distributed network that didn’t have any single point of failure. This is still true today. While there are large data centres around the world that aggregate traffic, we don’t depend on them. If one were to go offline, things would slow down, but the data would still flow.

The advent of the cloud, though, has completely changed how we use the Internet, especially in the worlds of business, education and government. And the cloud, alas, is not nearly as resilient.

Fifteen years ago, your average small or medium business would have their own servers. Those servers would be used to send/receive email, store files, and run various business or collaborative applications. Some of these servers may have been hosted offsite at a data centre to provide better security or speed of access, but the physical infrastructure belonged to someone — it was something you could touch and, more importantly, account for. Many companies kept their servers on site.

If a company’s server or network went down, it affected that company. They couldn’t send or receive email, they couldn’t open files, collaborate with staff or clients. They were offline.

But only they were offline.

Fast forward to today. Microsoft 365 dominates the corporate productivity services market with an estimated 45-50 per cent market share worldwide, with Google Workspace coming second, with around 30-35 per cent. This means that approximately 80 per cent of businesses are dependent on one of two vendors for their ability to transact business and communicate at even the most basic level.

Government and government-provided services, like education, health care and defence, are just as reliant on these services as the business world.

In today’s world, when Microsoft’s or Google’s services suffer a hiccup, it doesn’t affect one business. Or ten, or a hundred. Tens of thousands of business, and government offices and civil society institutions, all go offline. Simultaneously. Mom-and-pop stores, multi-billion-dollar corporations, elementary schools, hospitals, entire governments, all go out, all at once.

And we haven’t even talked about how Amazon, Microsoft and Google control almost two-thirds of the world’s web/application hosting market share. If one or all of those services go down, most of the websites you go to on a regular basis would suddenly become unreachable.

Kinda-sorta related to the above is Ted Gioia‘s “State of the Culture” post:

So remember the first rule: The culture always changes first. And then everything else adapts to it.

That’s why teens plugged into the most lowbrow culture often grasp the new reality long before elites figure it out. This was true 50 years ago, and it’s still true today.

So that’s our second rule: If you want to understand the emerging culture, look at the lives of teens and twenty-somethings — and especially their digital lives. (In some cases those are their only lives.)

The web has changed a lot in recent years, hasn’t it? Not long ago, the Internet was loose and relaxed. It was free and easy. It was fun. There wasn’t even an app store.

We made our own rules.

The web had removed all obstacles and boundaries. I could reach out to people all over the world.

The Internet, in those primitive days, put me back in touch with classmates from my youth. It reconnected me with friends I’d made during my many trips overseas. It strengthened my ties with relatives near and far. I even made new friends online.

It felt liberating. It felt empowering.

But it also helped my professional life. I had regular exchanges with writers and musicians in various cities and countries—without leaving the comfort of my home.

I made new connections. I opened new doors.

And this didn’t just happen to me. It happened to everybody.

“The world is flat,” declared journalist Thomas Friedman. All the barriers were gone — we were all operating on the same level. It felt like some imaginary Berlin Wall had fallen.

That culture of flatness changed everything. Ideas spread faster. Commerce moved more easily. Every day I encountered something new from some place far away.

But then it changed.

Twenty years ago, the culture was flat. Today it’s flattened.

I still participate in many web platforms — I need to do it for my vocation. (But do I really? I’ve started to wonder.) But now they feel constraining.

Even worse, they now all feel the same.

Instead of connecting with people all over the world, I now get “streaming content” 24/7.

Facebook no longer wants me stay in touch with friends overseas, or former classmates, or distant relatives. Instead it serves up memes and stupid short videos.

And they are the exact same memes and videos playing non-stop on TikTok — and Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, YouTube shorts, etc.

Every big web platforms feels the exact same.

That whole rich tapestry of my friends and family and colleagues has been replaced by the most shallow and flattened digital fluff. And this feeling of flattening is intensified by the lack of context or community.

The only ruling principle is the total absence of purpose or seriousness.

The platforms aggravate this problem further by making it difficult to leave. Links are censored. Intelligence is punished by the dictatorship of the algorithms. Every exit is blocked, and all paths lead to the endless scroll.

All this should be illegal. But somehow it isn’t.

Soviet Invasion of Finland: Winter War 1939-40

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published 18 Oct 2024

November 1939. Germany and the Soviet Union have conquered Poland, and Germany is at war with France and Britain. Moscow is free to do as it pleases in Eastern Europe and sets its sights on Finland – but the Winter War will be a nasty surprise for Stalin.

Corrections:
02:19 The dot marking Leningrad is about 80km too far east, it’s of course directly at the far eastern end of the Gulf of Finland.
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QotD: Infantry combat and esprit de corps

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What about the personal relationships that are formed in the context of conflict? Surely, the “band of brothers” is a truly universal experience, right (but note on the complexities of Shakespeare’s Henry V)? Surely the social bonds that held Easy Company together in 1944 and 1945 are the same as those from 1415? Or 415?

Well, no. Not quite.

We can approach this question through the idea of cohesion – the moral force that holds a group of combatants together on the battlefield under the intense emotional stresses of combat. The intense bonds that soldiers form in modern armies (particularly those in the European pattern) are not an accident, but a core part of how those armies, institutionally, seek to build cohesion. [W]e discussed briefly the emergence of the extensively drilled and disciplined “mechanical” soldier of Early Modern Europe, noting that this approach wasn’t necessary for the effective use of firearms (the Ottoman Janissaries, for instance, were quite good with firearms, but were not trained and organized in this way), but rather was a product of elite aristocratic (read: officer) disdain for their up-jumped peasant soldiers and thus the assumption by those aristocrats that the only way to get such men to fight effectively was to relentlessly drill them.

Now the funny thing about this system is that it clearly worked, but not for the reasons its aristocratic pioneers believed. It was only really after the Second World War that systematic study began to be made of unit cohesion (e.g. S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire (1947), though subsequent literature on the topic is voluminous and Marshal’s work has its problems, but its conclusions are broadly accepted having been confirmed in subsequent studies) [NR: Some discussion on Marshall and his theories here]. What emerged quite clearly was that it wasn’t “the cause” or patriotism that held troops together under fire, but group cohesion born out of an intense need not to let fellow soldiers in the unit down. In short, what held units together and made them fight more effectively was (in part, there are many conclusions in Men Against Fire) the strong social bonds between comrades.

And, in fact, the drill and discipline of early modern European armies unintentionally did quite a lot of cohesion building things. Soldiers were removed from civilian society (isolation from larger groups builds unit cohesion), split into very small groups (keeping the core group that coheres below Dunbar’s number aids in group cohesion; thus why the platoon is a natural unit size) and then pushed through difficult and unpleasant training (that drill and discipline) creating a sense of unique shared experience and sacrifice. All of which doesn’t render men machines, but it does create strong social bonds within the units that will keep the men fighting even when they care little for their cause (which they generally did in this period; one does not find a super-abundance of patriotism among, say, the Army of Flanders).

And there is a tendency to point to this cohesion, its modern source in “toughening” boot camp and to say, “aha! That is the true universal about effective soldier-warriors!” Except – and you knew there was going to be an except – except it isn’t. Systems built on the use of drill and discipline for the development of unit cohesion through social bonds are actually, historically speaking, quite rare. We see systems like that in use by the Romans from the Middle Republic forward (but significantly faded by the end of late antiquity; the Byzantine army doesn’t seem to function this way), in China from the Han Dynasty onward, in Japan for the ashigaru infantry from the Sengoku period, and in Europe from the Early Modern period. That sounds like a lot, but that is relatively small minority of the historical period and even then in a relatively small minority of places. It is, for instance, a period that only covers about half of the historical period in Western Europe, the place most often associated with this very system of organization (though that association is perhaps unfair to East Asia).

Instead, most societies relied on existing social bonds formed outside of the experience of war for cohesion. Greek hoplite armies, for instance, generally formed up by polis (read: city) and then within those blocks by still smaller and smaller social divisions, so that family and neighbors would be standing shoulder to shoulder in the battle line (Sparta does this through the system of communal messes, the syssitia, but the idea that you fought alongside the men you dined with socially – your neighbors, generally – was perfectly normal in most Greek cities). That was intentional – it allowed the phalanx to cohere through the social pressure not to be seen as a coward before the men who meant the most to you, whose shaming gaze you would have to endure in civilian life. The same pressures, by the well, held together the (mostly volunteer) armies of the American Civil War (on this, see, McPherson, For Cause and Comrades (1997)).

By contrast, “warrior” classes often rely on a sort of class solidarity along with the demand of an individual military aristocrat to be individually militarily excellent. Richard Kaeuper quips of the literature of the medieval knightly class that it was filled with “utterly tireless, almost obsessional emphasis placed on personal prowess” (R.W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999)). We’ve talked a fair bit about the values of mounted aristocrats, both in their role as combatants and in their roles as generals and those values are relatively disconnected from discipline-induced forms of buddy-cohesion. Of course exactly what “good generalship” or “good officership” looks like varies wildly from place to place – Alexander was expected to command his cavalry from the front; Roman emperors rarely took the battlefield and when they did they commanded from the rear since it would be foolish to risk the “brain” of the army in personal combat and in any event someone at the front of a cavalry charge can hardly direct the rest of the army.

One of the things I find most striking about the “warrior ethos” advanced by writers like Pressfield is that it accepts as normal the unique nature of the bonds that hold soldiers together in battle, assuming this bond and its shared sacrifice to be at once unique to combat and also transcendent to all combatants. But one of the key points made very well in Sebastian Junger’s War (2010) and later Tribe (2016) is just how strange that experience is, historically. Junger notes that in earlier societies, soldiers would have returned from war into communities (often small, agricultural communities or tribal communities) every bit as close-knit as the infantry platoon – and indeed, often involving literally the same people as the infantry platoon. Instead, the intense feeling of uniqueness that modern soldiers feel about the bonds of combat is because of the historically unusual deracination produced by modern societies by the industrial revolution and the post-industrial period.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.

March 6, 2025

Passionate belief in historical untruths

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As mentioned in earlier posts, one of the most toxic exports from Australia to the rest of the Anglosphere has been the academic indulgence in believing that “settler colonialism” explains everything about the history of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and anywhere else the British diaspora touched:

Welby in Zanzibar

Throughout the English-speaking world elites are falling over themselves to believe the very worst of their own countries.

In Britain, the Church of England has committed itself to spend an initial £100 million on slavery-reparations in response to the discovery that its endowment had “links” with African enslavement. “The immense wealth accrued by the Church … has always been interwoven with the history of African chattel enslavement”, a document explains. “African chattel enslavement was central to the growth of the British economy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the nation’s wealth thereafter”. And this has “continuing toxic consequences”.

Yet almost none of this is true. The evidence shows that the Church’s endowment fund was hardly involved in the evil of slave-trading at all. Most economic historians reckon the contribution of slave-trading and slavery to Britain’s economic development as somewhere between marginal and modest. And between abolition in 1834 and the present, multiple causes have intervened to diminish slavery’s effects.

Consonant with his church’s policy, the (then) Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby preached a sermon in Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar last year, in which he criticised Christian missionaries for treating Africans as inferior and confessed that “we [British] must repent and look at what we did in Zanzibar”.

Really? What the British did in Zanzibar during the second half of the 19th century was to force the Sultan to end the slave-trade. Indeed, the cathedral in which the archbishop was preaching was built over the former slave-market. And here’s what the pioneering missionary David Livingstone wrote about black Africans in 1871: “I have no prejudice against [the Africans’] colour; indeed, anyone who lives long among them forgets they are black and feels that they are just fellow men…. If a comparison were instituted, … I should like to take my place among [them], on the principle of preferring the company of my betters”.

[…]

St. John Baptiste church was one of many local churches to go up in flames during Justin Trudeau’s performative national guilt trip over “unmarked mass graves” at former Residential Schools across Canada.

Which bring us to Canada. The May 2021 claim by a Kamloops Indian band to have discovered the remains of 215 “missing children” of an Indian Residential School was quickly sexed up by the media into a story ‘mass graves’, with all its connotation of murderous atrocity. The Toronto Globe and Mail published an article under the title, “The discovery of a mass gravesite at a former residential school in Kamloops is just the tip of the iceberg”, in which a professor of law at UBC wrote: “It is horrific … a too-common unearthing of the legacy, and enduring reality, of colonialism in Canada”. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal buildings to honour the murdered children. Because the Kamloops school had been run by Roman Catholics, some zealous citizens took to burning and vandalising churches, 112 of them to date. The dreadful tale was eagerly broadcast worldwide by Al Jazeera.

Yet, four years later, not a single set of remains of a murdered Indian child in an unmarked grave has been found anywhere in Canada. Judging by the evidence collected by Chris Champion and Tom Flanagan in their best-selling 2023 book, Grave Error: How the Media Misled us (and the Truth about the Residential Schools), it looks increasingly probable that the whole, incendiary story is a myth.

So, prime ministers, archbishops, academics, editors, and public broadcasters are all in the business of exaggerating the colonial sins of their own countries against noble (not-so-very) savages — from London to Sydney to Toronto. Why?

The Iron Curtain Descends – W2W 10 – News of 1946

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

TimeGhost History
Published 5 Mar 2025

1946 sees the world teetering on the brink of a new global conflict. George Kennan’s long telegram outlines Moscow’s fanatical drive against the capitalist West, while our panel covers escalating espionage, strategic disputes over Turkey, and the emerging ideological battle between the U.S. and the USSR. Tune in as we break down the news shaping the dawn of the Cold War.
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As Trump’s tariffs begin to bite, Canadians strike back at … King Charles and Wayne Gretzky?

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

As if more evidence were needed that Canadians aren’t well-served by our political leaders, social media personalities and legacy media types are pointing at uninvolved figures to be rounded up as the targets of maple-flavoured Two Minutes’ Hate sessions:

Canada’s latest Emmanuel Goldstein replacement, “The Great One” aka Wayne Gretzky

You can’t have an outburst of nationalism without purity tests coming into play, and two prominent Canadian figures have failed theirs in the court of chattering-class opinion: Wayne Gretzky and King Charles III, of all people.

In recent consecutive days, hilariously, The Globe and Mail‘s website published the following headlines to its online readers’-letters pages: “Wayne Gretzky’s fall from grace is a long time coming”; “Let Wayne Gretzky feel some pain”; and “Wayne Gretzky has always been held in the highest regard … now, he is dead to me”.

Gretzky is friendly with President Trump, you see, which is unacceptable. And if Gretzky isn’t willing to publicly disavow Trump, he should be using his influence to sit Trump down and explain that Canada will never be the 51st state … at which point, presumably, something useful is supposed to happen. It’s never clear what that useful thing would be, beyond a cheap nationalist thrill.

Gretzky’s Yankeeism was confirmed when he served as honorary captain of Team Canada in the final game of the 4 Nations tournament in Boston. (Imagine if he hadn’t served as honorary captain!) He gave the American players a thumbs up — which in any other context would have been considered simple good sportsmanship. He didn’t wear a Team Canada sweater, but rather a suit — which in any other context wouldn’t even have been noticed. He didn’t wear his Order of Canada pin — well, now we’re just grasping at straws.

It’s funny that the same kind of people who have no time for the Crown under normal circumstances (even if they’re not quite out-and-out republicans) are delighted to pile on to any accusations that King Charles isn’t doing … something … to fight off the Bad Orange Man for us:

This brings us to our head of state, and the baffling calls in recent days for him to shake his sceptre toward Washington and declare that Canada shall never never never be the 51st state. If these calls were coming just from anti-monarchists, it would be understandable (though it’s odd to hear them suddenly demanding that the sovereign speak on our behalf). But all kinds of otherwise reasonable people jumped aboard as well, as if this was something the King should self-evidently be doing.

It is self-evidently not what the King should be doing — certainly not before receiving advice from the Canadian prime minister, and probably not at all. Charles’s mother wouldn’t have mouthed off, and I have to wonder if she would have gotten the same criticism were she still alive to see this mess.

Indeed, I think a moment like this is precisely when having an apolitical head of state — maybe even one that doesn’t live here — is most valuable. We have more than enough people, elected and unelected, completely and vocally embroiled in the Trump Tariff Wars, pursuing some combination of national, partisan and personal gain. Isn’t it nice to have precisely the sort of democratic constancy the United States now lacks? You don’t throw away an anchor, however rusty, with a gale on the horizon.

HMCS Bonaventure – The Pride of Canada’s Fleet

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

Skynea History
Published 22 Oct 2024

For today’s video, we’ll be looking at the last of Canada’s aircraft carriers. Not typically a navy you associate with that kind of ship, but the Canadians actually operated three during the Cold War.

The third, HMCS Bonaventure, is an interesting one. A small ship, that operated aircraft at the very edge of her capability. And routinely baffled American pilots in the process.

Yet, she was also a ship that came to an end before her time. Decommissioned and scrapped, right after an expensive (and extensive) mid-life overhaul. In what is generally seen as a bad political move, more than anything to do with her capabilities.
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QotD: Old Etonians

Filed under: Britain, Education, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If you’d told somebody in the mid 2000s that David Cameron would become Prime Minister, they would have laughed in your face. If you then told them that a few years later Boris Johnson would be one of his successors, they’d consider you bonkers. This was Blairite Britain – gone were the days of Macmillan, Douglas-Home, and the coterie of other prime ministers educated at that same dusty institution – the hegemony of the Old Etonian was firmly over. Yet Cameron became the 19th Prime Minister educated there, and Boris the 20th, making five out of the fourteen prime ministers elected during Queen Elizabeth II’s reign Old Etonians.

When I first started there, the traditions seemed daunting, and while you had a week of grace period to find your feet, it took a lot longer for the novelty truly to wear off. Dressed in a tailsuit that makes you look like a penguin, and that even the production team of Downton Abbey would question, it’s a complete culture shock. Teachers become “beaks”; homework becomes “EW (short for Extra Work)”, and the threat of “tardy book” (a punishment where you have to get up early to report to the School Office) is ever present. Your life is governed by a tutor, housemaster, and dame (a surrogate mother for your time there, and the most influential person in your day-to-day life), and outside of lessons (known as “schools”) you’re left to your own devices. It’s a sink or swim situation, and some can’t hack the overload of independence.

You’re constantly surrounded by things named after great men who have come before you – whether that be John Maynard Keynes (an economics society) or William Gladstone (a library) – and you can’t help but see yourself as heir to some great dynasty. Sitting in Upper School – a large schoolroom now mainly used for talks by visiting speakers – the walls are lined with marble busts of illustrious Old Etonians past, and it’s not hard to daydream about joining them. In our first ever assembly the head master put it best: “If you know that some interesting people have gone on to do some interesting things, whether it’s George Orwell or the Duke of Wellington, that does implicitly ask the question, why not you?” Success never seems far away, and often you’re regaled with tales about the time your beak caught a famous actor smoking, or how awful a pupil a noted academic once was. Neither does service, particularly when you pass the memorial boards for the First World War (as you do daily on the way to chapel): 1157 Old Etonians died, and 37 Old Etonians have won the Victoria Cross – 17 more than any other school.

In your final years, it’s fun to try and work out who’s going to be most successful after leaving, and – it never seems too outlandish – who among you could be a future prime minister. The people you consider are never confined to a particular group – it’s not “one of the debaters” or “one of the Rugby XV” – in fact, it’s often those who you can’t seem to categorize, or transverse the groups that are most magnetic. To get into Eton, you have to do well in the infamous “List Test”, composed of a computerized assessment and an interview with one of the beaks. For an eleven year old, it can be brutal (one boy left crying midway through our test), particularly as you don’t know what they want: they’re not looking for candidates that fit a particular box. Potential is valued more than current ability, and the greatest asset is that of being interesting. With only one in five getting an offer (odds stiffer than Oxbridge), and after five years of being expected to perform at the highest level, it’s unsurprising that students end up so successful.

Ivo Delingpole, “Boris and the Spirit of Eton”, Die Weltwoche, 2020-01-29.

March 5, 2025

The Korean War 037 – Matt the Ripper! – March 4, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 4 Mar 2025

This week is really a week of planning, as Matt Ridgway unveils the plans for Operation Ripper — to follow the somewhat disappointing Operation Killer, but there are South Korean spies involved, the blockade of Wonsan, and the continuing escalation of tensions between Douglas MacArthur and Harry Truman, with people in American High Command concerned that MacArthur is bent on starting World War 3.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:25 Recap
00:44 Killer and Ripper
04:14 Intel and Distractions
06:57 South Korean Spies
08:06 Truman and MacArthur (Again)
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Trump’s next target – Europe

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Doyle thinks that the next step of Donald Trump’s culture war will be highlighted by a struggle over freedom of speech with the UK and the regulators of the European Union:

British PM Keir Starmer talks with US President Donald Trump in the White House.

New battle lines are forming in the culture war. While the woke movement appears to be in retreat, the forces of authoritarianism are regrouping for a fresh assault. Rather than maintaining a straightforward conflict between right and left, the next phase of the culture war will most probably be waged between Europe and the United States. It has all the qualities of a novel by Henry James for the digital age, with the distinctions between the old world and the new brought once again into sharp focus.

Free speech will be the key issue. Most of us will have seen the footage of vice-president J. D. Vance last week in the Oval Office taking Keir Starmer to task for the “infringements on free speech that actually affect not just the British” but also “American technology companies and by extension, American citizens”. Starmer pushed back, saying “in relation to free speech in the UK, I’m very proud of our history there”. It’s a bit like Hannibal Lecter boasting about his ongoing commitment to vegetarianism.

The word “history” was apt, given that Starmer’s government is seemingly determined to ensure that free speech is consigned to the past. One of its first acts after seizing power was to ditch the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. In February, Angela Rayner revealed her plans for the establishment of a sixteen-member council on “Islamophobia” which could see the criticism of religion criminalised. Meanwhile, Yvette Cooper has been staunchly defending the police for recording “non-crime”, while the chairman of the College of Policing, Lord Herbert, has suggested that the best approach to tackling the controversy is to simply rename “non-crime hate incidents” as something more palatable. Apparently Lord Herbert believes that the problem is the nomenclature, not the fact that citizens are being investigated by the armed wing of the state for lawful behaviour.

All of this is before we get to Starmer applying pressure to the judiciary to mete out draconian sentences for offensive posts and memes on social media, and the government’s determination to crack down on online “disinformation”. Ours is an authoritarian government, and Starmer’s Orwellian denial of the truth of his position in the Oval Office is to be expected. Autocrats throughout history have enacted censorship “for the public good”. Today, they target “disinformation”, a term so vague that it can be applied to anyone who questions the narrative of the ruling class.

And so, as I say, the new front of the culture war will most likely be transatlantic. The US government will simply not tolerate the widespread censorship of its citizens by laws passed overseas. Jim Jordan, chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives, has already issued subpoenas to eight US tech companies to divulge all communications they have had with the UK government regarding “content moderation” (i.e., censorship). Jordan is particularly concerned about the Labour government’s intention to empower OfCom to regulate social media, and he has specifically mentioned UK officials who “have already threatened to use UK laws to police American speech”.

N.S. Lyons suggested in the latest post at The Upheaval that Vice President J.D. Vance’s real message to the European leaders can be rephrased as “Give Up the Information War and GTFO”:

The political elite of Europe and the Anglosphere appeared shocked by J.D. Vance’s wonderfully blunt speech in Munich last month. The U.S. Vice President declared Washington’s top security concern to be “the threat from within” the NATO alliance and castigated assembled leaders for their increasingly brazen assaults on “democratic values”, including censoring speech, suppressing popular opposition parties, and canceling elections. But if this shock isn’t feigned then it is rather remarkable, given that these elites were in their own way already effectively at war with the United States. All Vance did was point out the nature of this hidden conflict.

Vance delivered multiple messages with his speech, the broadest and most historic of which was that the era of “post-national” globalist liberalism is over. The United States, he indicated, now has a core interest in seeing a Western world that is collectively strong because its sovereign nations are strong, with the self-confidence to independently defend themselves physically, culturally, and spiritually. His emphasis on promoting free speech and democratic legitimacy tied into this message, but was about far more than the importance of “shared values” or even Washington’s new friendliness to nationalist parties. Practically, it was an implied warning that the role Europe has been playing as a proxy actor in the political and ideological conflicts raging in the United States will no longer be tolerated. More specifically, it was a declaration that ongoing transatlantic institutional, technological, and legal support for America’s embattled left-wing deep state must end – or else.

After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, America’s panicked establishment elites reacted by attempting to construct a system for managing public opinion through strict control of information, especially online information. The idea was that growing public support for populism was fueled by “low-information voters” and their consumption of “misinformation” and “disinformation”, including from foreign actors, and that if their “information diet” could just be controlled then they would stop voting wrong. The underlying assumption here was of course that the elite’s own increasingly radical policy preferences were the only rational path, opposable only by the stupid and easily manipulated. As Trump’s defeated opponent Hillary Clinton would later put it, social media platforms had fundamentally changed the information environment and “if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, we lose total control”.

This intended system of thought-control would later grow into the censorship industrial complex that was partially revealed following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. But a big obstacle initially stood in the way: the U.S. Constitution and its protection of free speech. The public might be receiving the “wrong” information on the internet, but “our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence”, as John Kerry lamented in a speech to the World Economic Forum.

Under the Biden administration, this legal problem was partially solved by simply ignoring it, the federal government directly colluding with technology companies and a network of “independent” (state-funded) “fact-checking” organizations to impose mass censorship on American citizens. The result was, as one federal judge later described it, effectively “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history”.

A more subtle and sustainable work-around was also discovered, however. This was to circumvent the U.S. Constitution by outsourcing the policing of the internet and populist movements to other countries around the world. This could be done because the internet is global and so the whole network is affected by government regulations on any local market of sufficient size. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic immediately grasped that legal and regulatory structures imposed by the European Union, with the leverage of its huge unified market, could for example force internet companies the world over – including U.S. companies – to change their behavior in order to comply and avoid losing access (this imperialistic regulatory strong-arming was dubbed the “Brussels Effect”, becoming Europe’s only significant innovation this century).

Colt Boa: Rarest of the Snake Revolvers

Filed under: USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Nov 2024

Of the seven revolvers Colt named after snakes, the rarest is the Colt Boa. Only a single production run of these were made totaling just 1,200 guns. They were made in 1985 as a custom order for the Lew Horton distribution company, which wanted something unique to offer its buyers. The Boa was an intermediary between the standard Colt MkV and the high-end Python. It was a 6-shot .357 Magnum with a full underlay and ventilated shroud. The only variation was in barrel length, as half were made with 4” barrels and half with 6” barrels. The serial numbers were “BOAxxxx”, with the 4” guns having odd numbers and the 6” ones getting even numbers. Five hundred of each were sold individually, but the first 100 of each length were packaged together into sequentially-numbered pairs in fancy cases.

The Boas all sold in 1985, and they are now the hardest to find for the Colt Snake collector. This particular pair is a gorgeous example of an original cased set, numbers 43 and 44.
(more…)

QotD: British and French Enlightenments

Filed under: Books, Britain, France, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In 2005, [Gertrude Himmelfarb] published The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments. It is a provocative revision of the typical story of the intellectual era of the late eighteenth century that made the modern world. In particular, it explains the source of the fundamental division that still doggedly grips Western political life: that between Left and Right, or progressives and conservatives. From the outset, each side had its own philosophical assumptions and its own view of the human condition. Roads to Modernity shows why one of these sides has generated a steady progeny of historical successes while its rival has consistently lurched from one disaster to the next.

By the time she wrote, a number of historians had accepted that the Enlightenment, once characterized as the “Age of Reason”, came in two versions, the radical and the skeptical. The former was identified with France, the latter with Scotland. Historians of the period also acknowledged that the anti-clericalism that obsessed the French philosophes was not reciprocated in Britain or America. Indeed, in both the latter countries many Enlightenment concepts — human rights, liberty, equality, tolerance, science, progress — complemented rather than opposed church thinking.

Himmelfarb joined this revisionist process and accelerated its pace dramatically. She argued that, central though many Scots were to the movement, there were also so many original English contributors that a more accurate name than the “Scottish Enlightenment” would be the “British Enlightenment”.

Moreover, unlike the French who elevated reason to a primary role in human affairs, British thinkers gave reason a secondary, instrumental role. In Britain it was virtue that trumped all other qualities. This was not personal virtue but the “social virtues” — compassion, benevolence, sympathy — which British philosophers believed naturally, instinctively, and habitually bound people to one another. This amounted to a moral reformation.

In making her case, Himmelfarb included people in the British Enlightenment who until then had been assumed to be part of the Counter-Enlightenment, especially John Wesley and Edmund Burke. She assigned prominent roles to the social movements of Methodism and Evangelical philanthropy. Despite the fact that the American colonists rebelled from Britain to found a republic, Himmelfarb demonstrated how very close they were to the British Enlightenment and how distant from French republicans.

In France, the ideology of reason challenged not only religion and the church, but also all the institutions dependent upon them. Reason was inherently subversive. But British moral philosophy was reformist rather than radical, respectful of both the past and present, even while looking forward to a more enlightened future. It was optimistic and had no quarrel with religion, which was why in both Britain and the United States, the church itself could become a principal source for the spread of enlightened ideas.

In Britain, the elevation of the social virtues derived from both academic philosophy and religious practice. In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith, the professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University, was more celebrated for his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) than for his later thesis about the wealth of nations. He argued that sympathy and benevolence were moral virtues that sprang directly from the human condition. In being virtuous, especially towards those who could not help themselves, man rewarded himself by fulfilling his human nature.

Edmund Burke began public life as a disciple of Smith. He wrote an early pamphlet on scarcity which endorsed Smith’s laissez-faire approach as the best way to serve not only economic activity in general but the lower orders in particular. His Counter-Enlightenment status is usually assigned for his critique of the French Revolution, but Burke was at the same time a supporter of American independence. While his own government was pursuing its military campaign in America, Burke was urging it to respect the liberty of both Americans and Englishmen.

Some historians have been led by this apparent paradox to claim that at different stages of his life there were two different Edmund Burkes, one liberal and the other conservative. Himmelfarb disagreed. She argued that his views were always consistent with the ideas about moral virtue that permeated the whole of the British Enlightenment. Indeed, Burke took this philosophy a step further by making the “sentiments, manners, and moral opinion” of the people the basis not only of social relations but also of politics.

Keith Windschuttle, “Gertrude Himmelfarb and the Enlightenment”, New Criterion, 2020-02.

March 4, 2025

Canada’s nasty authoritarian streak shows up in the “deprive Musk of his citizenship” online mob

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

In The Line, Leonid Sirota explains why we can’t just arbitrarily deprive a Canadian of his citizenship rights just because Charlie Angus has riled up a social media mob to demand it:

Elon Musk wrapped in the Canadian flag – created with Grok.

One other incontrovertible fact about Mr. Musk is that he is a Canadian citizen. His mother was born in Canada — which made her a citizen — as are her children, even though they were born abroad.

A large number of Mr. Musk’s and my fellow Canadians find the coexistence of these facts to be obnoxious. Whether out of anger or embarrassment, they are lining up to sign a petition to Parliament to demand that he be deprived of his Canadian citizenship. As of this writing, the petition has been signed by about 300,000 people. (In theory, these are Canadian citizens or residents, though on the Internet, nobody knows you didn’t actually watch the McDavid goal 97 times on loop.) At least one member of Parliament, the NDP’s Charlie Angus, is supportive.

This is appalling. The reasons given for depriving Mr. Musk of his Canadian citizenship are fundamentally authoritarian, as is the contempt for both the substantive and the procedural legal requirements involved in deprivation of citizenship that the petition manifests. That a member of Parliament is supporting this abomination is especially disturbing (and one reason this whole mess is worth caring about).

To start with the substantive point, the idea that a Canadian could be deprived of his citizenship for political reasons ought to be beyond the pale of polite discussion. It is the sort of thing the Soviets did to Mstislav Rostropovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others. Is Mr. Musk a Solzhenitsyn? Well, no. But so what? The principles at stake here are universal. They do not depend on whether one is a martyr or a millionaire, a genius or a jerk. (Solzhenitsyn, at any rate, was both jerk and genius. So is Mr. Musk. Not that it matters.)

More to the point, do you want the Canadian government to have the power to deprive people of their citizenship for their political beliefs, statements, or activities? If you are okay with a government led by a Justin Trudeau or a Mark Carney having this power, do you agree that one led by Pierre Poilievre should? (Or, of course, vice versa.)

And yes, no matter how patriotic and indignant the people who sign the petition, or support it, may feel, the demand to take away Mr. Musk’s citizenship is political. The first recital of the petition accuses him of having “engaged in activities that go against the national interest of Canada”. I think the accusation is well-founded. But it is a political accusation: the national interest is a political concept. The petition then claims Mr. Musk “has used his wealth and power to influence our elections”. If he has, that is political action that Canadian citizens are entitled to take, subject to applicable laws, which the petition isn’t even alleging Mr. Musk broke. Finally, the petition claims that Mr. Musk “has now become a member of a foreign government that is attempting to erase Canadian sovereignty”. Stipulated. But the actions of this foreign government, no matter how dishonourable, distasteful, and dangerous for Canada, have so far stayed within the realm of politics.

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