We need our illusions or else we could not face the world; or perhaps I should say we need illusions as a genre, if not necessarily the ones we have. There are some illusions, no doubt, that hinder us or harm us, but there are others that sustain us. Humankind, said Eliot (who used the word before it became politically correct), cannot bear very much reality — especially about itself.
The illusion that one would have been a success but for malevolent circumstance is a very necessary one for a lot of people, for there is no more pitiless or cruel a world than a pure and perfectly functioning meritocracy. Such an arrangement would confront everyone, or at least almost everyone, with his own mediocrity, for the mediocre are by definition in the majority. And who is not mediocre by comparison with Mozart? In a pure meritocracy, everyone would find his true, utterly deserved level; but it is a mere prejudice that if there were justice in the world, everyone would be better off. In a pure meritocracy, there would be no paranoid defense against one’s own nullity — one could blame only oneself for it and no one else. That is why the concept of equality of opportunity, besides implying a kind of Brave New World world, is so deeply vicious, and why so many people who promote it are obviously hate-filled. They do not want to serve humanity but torture it.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Grand Illusion”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-08-19.
June 26, 2023
QotD: The danger to mental health in a functioning meritocracy
June 25, 2023
Workers will be forced to stop working to salve the consciences of university-educated elite wankers
Brendan O’Neill on the Climate Goblin’s latest stunt in Sweden:
Picture the daughter of an opera singer preventing working-class men from doing their jobs. A young woman so well-connected that she probably has presidents on speed-dial physically blocking truck drivers from doing what they do. A child of privilege gathering with her similarly comfortable pals to stop working people from working.
Well, shorn of all the fact-lite bluster about “saving the planet”, that’s exactly what Greta Thunberg’s latest eco-stunt adds up to. The pint-sized prophetess of doom is back in the headlines. This time for getting arrested in Malmo harbour in Sweden, where she and other members of the End is Nigh cult have been holding a sit-down protest to stop oil tankers from leaving and delivering their life-giving cargo to the good people of Sweden and beyond.
The photographs from this temper tantrum disguised as a political protest tell a fascinating tale of the classism and narcissism in green politics. In the middle of the road are the smug-looking youths. One has green hair. Others sport beanie hats. None has ever driven a truck, clearly. Their banners speak of defending Earth from man’s evil burning of the toxic sludge of oil. And in the background are the supposed agents of this evil – the truckers; working men idly standing by their tankers while the world’s media get shots of Greta looking sad for Gaia.
What an apt snapshot of the hierarchy of virtue in what passes for radical politics today. Working-class people reduced to background actors, non-player characters, in a drama feverishly focussed on the jumped-up angst of the privileged. Working men as mere backdrop to the eco-neuroses of the comfortably off. In the moral universe fashioned by eco-influencers and their legion fawners in the political and media elites, the irrational fears of the upper-middle class carry more weight than the living standards of the working class.
It’s a story we see repeated across every act of eco-agitation today. In the UK, the plummy activists of Just Stop Oil, all called Poppy or Edred, block roads and prevent builders, scaffolders, deliverymen, mums and others from carrying out their essential work. The fightback of working men against this imperious imposition on their right to earn a living – witness scaffolders pushing eco-irritants out of the road – has been heartening to see. As a worker at Smithfield meat market in London put it a few years back when Extinction Rebellion types stormed in to speak up for animal rights or something, why should I allow this “happy-clappy mob” to stop me from being “able to pay my bills”?
British schoolchildren mock their oh-so-woke teachers
In Christopher Gage’s weekly round-up, I discovered that I shared a trait with Ted Kaczynski (“austere anarchist scholar” as US mainstream media might have described him). Not just any trait, but the one that ended up putting him in prison after nearly twenty years of sending bombs through the mail:
Elliot Rodger, Ed Kemper and Ted Kaczynski.
Photos from Quillette.
… Ted insisted on the proper use of the idiom, “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too”. Ted rejected the common and logically fraught version: “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too”. Indeed, you can. You must have your cake if you are to eat your cake. You cannot have your cake once you’ve eaten your cake.
That turn of phrase helped F.B.I agents snare Ted. His sister-in-law read his essay, recognised the writing style, and the peculiar diction, and then grassed him up to the rozzers.
For the record, this may be the only point of agreement I have with that noted austere scholar, although I’ve never read any of his writings to find out.
Another amusing incident involved children taking the Mickey out of ultra-progressive teachers in British schools:
Last week, schoolchildren in Sussex dropped themselves into the soup after suggesting that their fellow classmate is not actually a cat.
Two thirteen-year-old girls at Rye College were told they “should go to a different school” if they didn’t believe that a girl could identify as a cat.
During a “life education” class, the pair said there was “no such thing as agender” and: “If you have a vagina, you’re a girl, and if you have a penis, you’re a boy — that’s it.”
When they queried how someone could identify as a cat, the pair were blasted for questioning their classmate’s identity.
An investigation found children at schools across the land now identify as dinosaurs and horses. Another often dons a cape and demands to be acknowledged as a moon. Another identifies as Bambi.
After the hysteria simmered, it became obvious what was going on here. And it too became obvious that this is a good thing.
Reader, these children are taking the Mickey.
When confronted with obvious nonsense held by their preachy, supposedly superior teachers, these kids cannot resist mocking them to a nub.
After all, if one can identify as whatever one wants then that includes anything one wants. For teenagers primed with mischief, this is just too good a brew not to sup on a daily basis.
And it is a promising sign. Ridicule, the sharp-elbowed sister of truth, is essential to all progress. Clearly, these kids are unafraid to think for themselves and are determined to see that which is beyond their own nose.
Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of what almost everybody knows to be patent nonsense. As history assures us, once something becomes a laughingstock it soon dies of ridicule.
As James Thurber put it, that which cannot withstand laughter is not a good thing.
The Greatest Pincer Movement in Military History – WW2 – Week 252 – June 24, 1944
World War Two
Published 24 Jun 2023The Red Army surges forward in Operation Bagration, a mighty new offensive to destroy German Army Group Centre. Fighting continues in Normandy, Italy, and Finland. The United States Navy tears the heart out of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Philippine Sea even as the Imperial Japanese Army has success in China. The British and Indian armies lift the siege of Kohima.
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Fifty years after The Princess Bride was published
William Goldman’s novel The Princess Bride was not a blockbuster, nor did the movie adaptation get a huge box office when it released in 1987. Yet despite apparent early mediocrity, it became a cult classic. It’s now fifty years after the book came out, and Kevin Mims has a look back at both the novel and the movie:
Even by the eccentric standards of fantasy literature, William Goldman’s 1973 novel The Princess Bride is extremely odd. The book purports to be an abridged edition of a classic adventure story written by someone named Simon Morgenstern. In a bizarre introduction (more about which in a moment), Goldman claims merely to have acted as editor. Unlike Rob Reiner’s much-loved 1987 film adaptation, the book’s full title is The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The “Good Parts” Version. Yes, all that text actually appeared on the cover of the book’s first hardcover edition (all but the first three words have been scrubbed from the covers of most subsequent editions).
In the 1990s, I worked at a Tower Books store in Sacramento. Every few months, someone would come into the store and ask if we had an unabridged edition of S. Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride. The first time this happened, a younger colleague who had worked there longer than I had told my customer, “The Princess Bride was written by William Goldman. There is no S. Morgenstern. Goldman made him up.” The customer wasn’t convinced. “It’s metafiction,” my colleague explained. “A novel that comments on its own status as a text.” When the customer had left, my colleague told me that a lot of people still believe there is an original version of the novel available somewhere, written by Morgenstern. Having fallen in love with the story via the Hollywood film, they were now looking for the ur-text.
Although I was a big fan of William Goldman, I had never read The Princess Bride. My wife and I saw the film when it first appeared in American theaters, and we have rewatched it several times since on VHS and DVD. Only about 10 years ago did I actually get around to reading the novel. And when I did, I found myself sympathizing with all those people who still believe that, somewhere in the world, there exists an unedited edition.
In his introduction, Goldman tells us that S. Morgenstern was from the tiny European nation of Florin, located somewhere between Germany and Sweden, which is where the story’s action takes place. Such a place never existed, but it’s not surprising that many 21st-century American readers don’t know the names of every current and former European kingdom. European history is littered with microstates that rose briefly and then vanished without leaving much of a trace. Back in the 1990s, before Internet access became commonplace, confirming the existence of a small defunct European statelet would have involved a trip to the library.
But readers in the 1970s might have been more alive to Goldman’s ruse. Back then, metafiction was all the rage. John Barth became a literary superstar (among the academic set, anyway) with books like The Sot-Weed Factor (which, like The Princess Bride, is a fantastical comic adventure supposedly written by a fictional author) and Giles Goat-Boy (the text of which, Barth writes in the foreword, was said to have been written by a computer). In 1983, Goldman would publish a second novel behind the Morgenstern pseudonym, titled The Silent Gondoliers, but this time he removed all mention of himself, even from the copyright page.
Canada’s DeLorean – Bricklin SV-1
Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 5 Sept 2020This week, it’s back to cars, and today we look at the history of a motoring scandal that took place 10 years before DeLorean and his DMC-12, but followed nearly the same notes; a rushed design, shady business practices, an inexperienced workforce in an impoverished part of the world, etc.
The Bricklin SV-1 may have looked good on paper, but in reality it was a severely flawed design that was ahead of its time in many aspects, but highly primitive in others.
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QotD: We won’t be seeing any rebooted TV shows from the 1990s
Thirty years on, we can only dream of a government competent enough to cover up contact with extraterrestrials. As someone remarked at Z Man’s the other day, our government is now so retarded, Eric Swalwell — a high-ranking member of the House intelligence committee and putative presidential candidate — couldn’t successfully bone a hooker. Sorry, gang, the aliens won’t be stopping by; they only want to make contact with intelligent life.
Severian, “Random Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-17.
June 24, 2023
Official mythmaking about the Empire Windrush in 1948
The Armchair General unpacks some of the story-spinning being conducted by the British government and various charities to mark the 75th anniversary of the voyage of the Empire Windrush from Jamaica to Britain:
“The National Windrush Monument” by amandabhslater is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
.
The Armchair General notes that there is much excitement about the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the ship called the Empire Windrush — which arrived on 22 June 1948 — and the contribution of the so-called Windrush Generation.
The myth currently being constructed is that those coming from Jamaica on the ship were invited, in order to rebuild a Britain struggling to recover from Word War II; we are told that, with so many young men killed in the fighting, Britain needed menial workers to selflessly come and rebuild our economy. Indeed, this view of events has been cemented in a much-lauded poem by Professor Laura Serrant.
Remember … you called.
Remember … you called
YOU. Called.
Remember, it was us, who came.Like almost any story constructed by governments and charities over at least the last thirty years, this narrative is dodgy at best and downright dishonest at worst. The simple fact is that the ship’s operator had expected to leave Jamaica under capacity and so offered passage at half price: many local men (and it was all men) took the opportunity.
Writing in The Spectator, in an article well worth reading in full, Ed West points out that the British government certainly did not encourage these immigrants at all.
Far from calling them, the British government was alarmed by the news. A Privy Council memo sent to the Colonial Office on 15 June stated that the government should not help the migrants: “Otherwise there might be a real danger that successful efforts to secure adequate conditions of these men on arrival might actually encourage a further influx.”
Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones replied: “These people have British passports and they must be allowed to land.” But, he added confidently: “They won’t last one winter in England.” Indeed, Britain had recently endured some very harsh winters.
The Ministry of Labour was also unhappy about the arrival of the Jamaican men, minister George Isaacs warning that if they attempted to find work in areas of serious unemployment “there will be trouble eventually”. He said: “The arrival of these substantial numbers of men under no organised arrangement is bound to result in considerable difficulty and disappointment. I hope no encouragement will be given to others to follow their example.”
Nor was it the solely the evil Tories who were concerned:
Soon afterwards, 11 concerned Labour MPs wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee stating that the government should “by legislation if necessary, control immigration in the political, social, economic and fiscal interests of our people … In our opinion such legislation or administration action would be almost universally approved by our people.” The letter was sent on 22 June; that same day the Windrush arrived at Tilbury.
One can hardly be surprised: after all, 75 years ago, the Labour Party at least strove to represent the working class of Britain and the simple fact is that there was, at the time, massive unemployment — so much so that the government was heavily subsidising tickets to Australia (at £10) in order to encourage British people to emigrate (over 2 million British people left between 1948 and 1960).
There is a certain amount of well-intentioned inclusive myth-making in this story, and from a historical point of view the idea that “diversity built Britain”, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, is bizarre. Until 1952 Britain was the richest country in Europe, after which we massively fell behind our continental rivals – so if diversity did “build” the country, it didn’t do a great job.
One can argue, I think, that the Windrush Generation made a great many contributions, in common with many immigrants; and if their contribution was not, in reality, as large as is claimed, then they share that with the EEC/EU’s Common Market which, again (and despite all the claims), brought no discernible benefit to the UK.
H/T to Tim Worstall for the link.
Canada’s Online News Act already impacting news delivery for smaller outlets
A local site I use regularly has already begun to feel the negative effects of the federal government’s Online News Act (aka Bill C-18):
Durham Radio News (DRN) doesn’t normally post editorial content, but when local news is being attacked we refuse to stay silent.
Bill C-18 is now law and will have a very negative impact on local independent newsrooms such as DRN.
The bill forces major tech companies such as Google and Meta to pay news outlets for content.
The vast majority of referrals to our DRN site come from Facebook and Google.
Both platforms have been instrumental in growing our audience.
Despite multiple warnings from Meta and Google that they would block news, the Liberal government proceeded with Bill C-18.
It’s now law and in a statement Meta says news will no longer be available on Facebook and Instagram.
Google is expected to follow suit.
Both tech giants have publicly said they don’t make much money off links to news stories so it doesn’t make financial sense for them to pay news providers.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called their threats to remove news a bullying tactic and said it will not work with his government.
It really appears the Liberals thought they were bluffing, we now know they were not.
DRN has been trying to get our voices heard for months on the negative impact this bill would have on our business.
We were drowned out by larger media outlets who would stand to benefit from this bill.
We will not be naming other outlets and we don’t begrudge the financial help they are already receiving.
Meta provides funding through fellowships with some media partners, and it is these outlets that became greedy and were asking for more.
For them it doesn’t matter if they get kicked off social media platforms.
For us it will make a huge impact.
“… every time I see some fine new supercluster-aspirational buzzword-laden legislative boondoggle coming from our federal government I know that my life is going to get worse in some minor, petty, and yet measurable way”
Jen Gerson is irked by the federal government’s latest petty diktat to “save the planet” from single-use plastic bags that bans the use of bags that are not made of plastic:
Those who follow my work will know that I am an unreformed Calgary evangelist. I like this city for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that I’m a member of the Calgary CO-OP, a chain of local grocery stores. For those who are lucky enough to enjoy something like this, a co-op offers particular advantages over their conventional counterparts; we get a small share of the profits that the chain earns every year, for example. The stores stock local produce, meats, grain, and processed foods from Calgary-based suppliers, and from nearby farms. CO-OP also provides a number of top-notch house brand supplies. National chains are simply not as nimble, nor as local. They can’t be.
But I admit that one of the things I enjoy most about CO-OP is its green grocery bags. When stores across Canada began to phase out the use of single-use plastic bags, I was despondent. The environmental rationale for the ban was thin, but mostly I was annoyed because I’m chronically disorganized and can never remember to bring reusable bags.
So when CO-OP replaced plastic bags with a fully compostable alternative, I was delighted. Granted, we would have to pay a small fee to purchase these bags, but the per-unit cost was actually less than what we would normally spend on a box of Glad compost-bin liners. So it all evened out.
To make matters even better, unlike paper straws, the compostable bags are superior to their plastic alternatives. CO-OP advertises this point on their site: “They are stronger than a plastic checkout bag. You can carry a medium-size turkey or three bottles of wine with no problem.”
I can also attest to this. The bags are an absolute win for everybody involved.
So when I discovered on Thursday that Ottawa plans to ban these items, considering them a “single-use plastic”, I lost my goddamn mind.
Not only will this represent a small inconvenience for me and my family, but it is also one of the laziest, most idiotic decisions issued from this remote, non-responsive federal government I have yet to encounter.
The bags do not contain plastic.
Let me say that again, because apparently the sound of western voices doesn’t quite travel all the way to the the slower bureaucrats in the back: “THE BAGS DO NOT CONTAIN PLASTIC”. You fucking muppets.
[…]
Look, Ottawa, are you there? Are any of you listening, or am I just screaming into the void? For the sake of the entire country, I hope, I pray that there is somebody with an IQ above 92 capable of not just reading this desperate missive, but of really, truly understanding it.
This shit — this, right here.
This. Shit.
This is why we hate you.
This is why we fucking hate you.
Nobody outside the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal triangle sees a headline like “New Initiative from Ottawa!” and thinks: “Oh, how exciting. I’m so keen to see what grand notion those crafty MPs in Ottawa have cooked up now! Come, Maude, let us settle ourselves before the The National at Six so we can understand how our fine federal government is working to make our lives better.”
Nobody does that. Because every time I see some fine new supercluster-aspirational buzzword-laden legislative boondoggle coming from our federal government I know that my life is going to get worse in some minor, petty, and yet measurable way.
The Most Reliable and Versatile Sub-orbital Rockets Ever Made; the Black Brant Sounding Rockets
Polyus
Published 31 Aug 2018The Black Brant series of sounding rockets was a great success and a proud contribution to the global race for space. While not as glamorous as an orbital rocket, the Black Brants helped scientists from around the globe research and better understand the Aurora and the Earth’s ionosphere.
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QotD: The plight of miners in pre-industrial societies
In the ancient Mediterranean, the clear testimony of the sources is that mining was a low-status occupation, one for enslaved people, criminals and the truly desperate. Being “sent to the mines” is presented, alongside being sent to work in the mills, as a standard terrible punishment for enslaved people who didn’t obey their owners and it is fairly clear in many cases that being sent to the mines was effectively a delayed death sentence. Diodorus Siculus describes mining labor in the gold mines of Egypt this way, in a passage that is fairly representative of the ancient sources on mining labor more generally (3.13.3, trans Oldfather (1935)):
For no leniency or respite of any kind is given to any man who is sick, or maimed, or aged, or in the case of a woman for her weakness, but all without exception are compelled by blows to persevere in their labours, until through ill-treatment they die in the midst of their tortures. Consequently the poor unfortunates believe, because their punishment is so excessively severe, that the future will always be more terrible than the present and therefore look forward to death as more to be desired than life.
It is clear that conditions in Greek and Roman mines were not much better. Examples of chains and fetters – and sometimes human remains still so chained – occur in numerous Greek and Roman mines. Unfortunately our sources are mostly concerned with precious metal mines and those mines also seem to have been the worst sorts of mines to work in, since the long underground shafts and galleries exposed the miners to greater dangers from bad air to mine-collapses. That said, it is hard to imagine working an open-pit iron mine by hand, while perhaps somewhat safer, was any less back-breaking, miserable toil, even if it might have been marginally safer.
Conditions were not always so bad though, particularly for free miners (being paid a wage) who tended to be treated better, especially where their labor was sorely needed. For instance, a set of rules for the Roman mines at Vipasca, Spain provided for contractors to supply various amenities, including public baths maintained year-round. The labor force at Vipasca was clearly free and these amenities seem to have been a concession to the need to make the life of the workers livable in order to get a sufficient number of them in a relatively sparsely populated part of Spain.
The conditions for miners in medieval Europe seems to have been somewhat better. We see mining communities often setting up their own institutions and occasionally even having their own guilds (for instance, there was a coal-workers guild in Liege in the 13th century) or internal regulations. These mining communities, which in large mining operations might become small towns in their own right, seem to have often had some degree of legal privileges when compared to the general rural population (though it should be noted that, as the mines were typically owned by the local lord or state, exemption from taxes was essentially illusory as the lord or king’s cut of the mine’s profits was the taxes). It does seem notable that while conditions in medieval mines were never quite so bad as those in the ancient world, the rapid expansion of mining activity beginning in the 15th century seems to have coincided with a loss of the special status and privileges of earlier medieval European miners and the status associated with the labor declined back down to effectively the bottom of the social spectrum.
(That said, it seems necessary to note that precious metal-mining done by non-free Native American laborers at the order of European colonial states appears to have been every bit as cruel and deadly as mining in the ancient world.)
Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.
June 23, 2023
The Combat Engineers of D-Day – WW2 Special Documentary
World War Two
Published 22 Jun 2023How do you blast through the obstacles and minefields on the beaches of Normandy? How do you get thousands of tonnes of tanks, guns, and men into the fight? And what about reopening the shattered French ports? You need men who are as skilled in construction as they are destruction. You need the engineers.
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From Operation Barbarossa in 1941 to the disinformation and cover-up over the origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus
Chris Bray outlines the utterly amazing situation between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on the eve of Hitler launching Operation Barbarossa — where Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would attack Russia despite overwhelming evidence from many sources — to the parallel situation over Covid:
Several sources quite specifically reported to the Soviet government that the Germans would invade around dawn on June 22. Their reports can be found in the Soviet archives in a “folder of dubious and misleading reports”. Then, shortly before dawn on June 22, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Military leaders on the border called in reports of the invasion, and the people they talked to in Moscow declined to believe them. Soviet border troops held their fire, seeing Germans while being ordered to understand that no true invasion could possibly be underway. Stalin knew better, and contradicting Josef Stalin was known to be a fatal mistake. Achieving an entirely avoidable surprise, the Germans destroyed much of the Soviet air force on the ground, parked wingtip-to-wingtip for the convenience of the invader’s bombers.
[…]
An invasion that could have been met with brutal severity from the first moment instead achieved considerable initial success against a supine nation because the Soviet leader, and the chain of subordinates beneath him who were forced to adopt his conception of facts and truth, assumed that things they didn’t wish to believe constituted disinformation. Millions of lives were wasted for that illusion. A society that categorizes inconvenient truths in this way is committing a form of suicide, hiding from hard facts that demand acknowledgment.
Now: In 2021, the lab leak theory was a disgusting lie with “racist roots”.
In June of 2023, the, uh, first people who got sick with Covid turn out to have been, uh, scientists at the lab in Wuhan. BUT THEY PROBABLY HAD SOME BAT SOUP AT THE WET MARKET, IS WHY, or something.
Stupid conspiracy theorists, you people are such MORONS, do you actually bel— okay, that one’s true too.
We’ve somehow developed an industry of professional information barriers, dimwitted parasitical human garbage whose sole function in life is to prevent understanding by pasting “disinformation” stickers on things that you’re not supposed to know.
FG-42: Perhaps the Most Impressive WW2 Shoulder Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Mar 2023The first production version of the FG42 used a fantastically complex milled receiver and a distinctive sharply swept-back pistol grip. A contract to make 5,000 of them was awarded to Krieghoff in late spring of 1943, but by the fall its replacement was already well into development. The milled receiver used a lot of high-nickel steel which was becoming difficult for Germany to acquire, and it was decided to develop a stamped receiver to ease production obstacles. Ultimately only about 2,000 of the early Type E FG42 rifles were actually made, and only 12 or 15 are registered in the US. They are a remarkably advanced rifle, and extremely interesting.
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