In my warfare survey, I have a visual gag where for a week and a half after our WWI lecture, every lecture begins with the same slide showing an aerial photograph (Wiki) of the parallel trenches of the First World War because so much of the apparatus of modern warfare exists as a response, a desperate need to never, ever do the trench stalemate again. And that’s where our story starts.
Fighting aircraft, as a technology in WWI, were only in their very infancy. On the one hand the difference between the flimsy, unarmed artillery scout planes of the war’s early days and the purpose-built bombers and fighters of the war’s end was dramatic. On the other hand the platforms available at the end of the war remained very limited. Once again we can use a late-war bomber like the Farman F.50 – introduced too late to actually do much fighting in WWI – as an example of the best that could be done. It has a range of 260 miles – too short to reach deep into enemy country – and a bomb load of just 704lbs. Worse yet it was slow and couldn’t fly very high, making it quite vulnerable. It is no surprise that bombers like this didn’t break the trench stalemate in WWI or win the war.
However, anyone paying attention could already see that these key characteristics – range, speed, ceiling and the all-important bomb-load – were increasing rapidly. And while the politicians of the 1920s often embraced the assumption that the War to End All Wars had in fact banished the scourge of war from the Earth – or at the very least, from the corner of it they inhabited such that war would now merely be a thing they inflicted on other, poorer, less technologically advanced peoples – the military establishment did not. European peace had always been temporary; the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the Congress of Vienna (1815) had not ended war in Europe, so why would the Treaty of Versailles (1919)? There had always been another war and they were going to plan for it! And they were going to plan in the sure knowledge that the bombers the next war would be fought with would be much larger, faster, longer ranged and more powerful than the bombers they knew.
One of those interwar theorists was Giulio Douhet (1869-1930), an Italian who had served during the First World War. Douhet wasn’t the only bomber advocate or even the most influential at the time – in part because Italy was singularly unprepared to actually capitalize on the bomber as a machine, given that it was woefully under-industrialized and bomber-warfare was perhaps the most industrial sort of warfare on offer at the time (short of naval warfare) – but his writings exemplify a lot of the thinking at the time, particularly The Command of the Air (1921). But figures like Hugh Trenchard in Britain or Billy Mitchell in the United States were driving similar arguments, with similar technological and institutional implications. But first, we need to get the ideas.
Like many theorists at the time, Douhet was thinking about how to avoid a repeat of the trench stalemate, which as you may recall was particularly bad for Italy. For Douhet, there was a geometry to this problem; land warfare was two dimensional and thus it was possible to simply block armies. But aircraft – specifically bombers – could move in three dimensions; the sky was not merely larger than the land but massively so as a product of the square-cube law. To stop a bomber, the enemy must find the bomber and in such an enormous space finding the bomber would be next to impossible, especially as flight ceilings increased. In Britain, Stanley Baldwin summed up this vision by famously quipping, “no power on earth can protect the man in the street from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.” And technology seemed to be moving this way as the possibility for long-range aircraft carrying heavy loads and high altitudes became more and more a reality in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Consequently, Douhet assumed there could be no effective defense against fleets of bombers (and thus little point in investing in air defenses or fighters to stop them). Rather than wasting time on the heavily entrenched front lines, stuck in the stalemate, they could fly over the stalemate to attack the enemy directly. In this case, Douhet imagined these bombers would target – with a mix of explosive, incendiary and poison gas munitions) the “peacetime industrial and commercial establishment; important buildings, private and public; transportation arteries and centers; and certain designated areas of civilian population”. This onslaught would in turn be so severe that the populace would force its government to make peace to make the bombing stop. Douhet went so far as to predict (in 1928) that just 300 tons of bombs dropped on civilian centers could end a war in a month; in The War of 19– he offered a scenario where in a renewed war between Germany and France where the latter surrendered under bombing pressure before it could even mobilize. Douhet imagined this, somewhat counterintuitively, as a more humane form of war: while the entire effort would be aimed at butchering as many civilians as possible, he thought doing so would end wars quickly and thus result in less death.
Clever ideas to save lives by killing more people are surprisingly common and unsurprisingly rarely turn out to work.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Strategic Airpower 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-10-21.
January 23, 2025
QotD: The origins of strategic airpower
January 22, 2025
“If this country MAIDs itself in the next 18 months, we at The Line know what slogan belongs on Canada’s epitaph”
The Line‘s editors gathered up the first day’s worth of Donald Trump II – The Trumpening and sifted out the bits particularly relevant to the dysfunctional Dominion to the north:
Donald Trump successfully trolled Canada’s hypersensitive political class about Canada becoming the 51st state of the union. The anguished butthurt still pains them.
What is happening right now was absolutely foreseeable. No one can claim with a straight face that U.S. tariffs could not have been foreseen on January 21, 2025, a full eight years to the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated for the first time. It’s not 2016, anymore. Nobody was blindsided.
Your Line editors wrote plenty of columns over the past decade noting that even if Donald Trump the man were not re-elected, the protectionist and reactionary currents that pushed him to power were still ascendant in America. The Biden admin was a reprieve, an opportunity for Canada to make necessary internal changes to withstand those currents.
And what did this country do with that time?
Jack all.
We at The Line have been scratching our noggins trying to think of single meaningful Canadian reform or improvement to come out of Trump 1. We did nothing to strengthen ourselves internally by an iota. Not a single lesson was learned.
It’s entirely possible that we were inevitably going to be dinged by some U.S. administration and, perhaps, this was not avoidable. No one can fully mitigate all risks. Granted.
But we can certainly do literally anything to address risks that are highly probable. Instead, we have absolutely degraded both our moral and financial capacity to be resilient in the face of economic threats; and that degradation is the direct result of almost ten years of Liberal party priorities, inactions, or choices ranging on files from crime, to market diversification, to being truly useful to our international allies, to failures on interprovincial trade.
This wasn’t unforeseen. We were willfully blind. That’s different.
We ignored the looming threat in part because our government was distracted by COVID. But also also because Canada’s political culture is too immature to make hard decisions, or to have real debates about trade offs or priorities.
Justin Trudeau is the kind of prime minister who would rather run the kind of country that lets him spout off on Jake Tapper about compassion and $10-day-day daycare and dental programs than NATO spending.
What about the scads of taxpayer cash we’ve squandered on things like “superclusters”? What if we had prioritized strategically crucial projects like Northern Gateway or Energy East, instead of letting them die under the mantra of: “no business case”.
Remember when Germany and Japan came asking after our natural gas supplies in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine? What if we had spent oh, say, $13 billion, on fast tracking some kind of natural gas facility to supply our international allies because doing so served a strategic national interest rather than a pure economic one.
We didn’t pull that number from the air, by the way: that’s what Canada subsequently committed to subsidies for EV plants in southern Ontario — something for which there was a scant “business case” before, and virtually none now that Trump has decided to scrap EV subsidies. It’s looking not-great, Bob. Not great at all.
See, that’s the problem with running a low-productivity, highly centralized griftocracy that is more invested in expanding entitlements, symbolic action and emotional gratification than actually doing anything. We are now severely limited in our capacity to respond in the face of serious economic threats. We can talk a good game. We can bluster. We can invest in more symbolic retaliatory action; but we have utterly squandered the internal resilience required to mount a real fight in even a trade war, much less a kinetic one.
And we at The Line can’t help but note the deafening silence from our international allies as well. They think we’ve got it coming, too. Perhaps there’s “no business case” for sticking their necks out on our behalf.
The first time a big new battery plant was subsidized, I thought it was a bad idea. Then it happened again and again. This is exactly why you don’t want your government at any level “picking winners”! Ross McKitrick had a series of tweets discussing this and other noteworthy executive orders issued (thread on Threadreader, but that may not be available for long):
The Korean War 031 – Operation Wolfhound – January 21, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 21 Jan 2025Matt Ridgway sends forth the US 27th Infantry Regiment, known as the Wolfhounds, into the no-mans-land between the UN and Chinese lines to sniff out and hunt down their enemy. The success or failure of his first few operations in Korea could be crucial, as confidence in the UN mission from generals, politicians, and the US’ allies continues to teeter on a knife edge. A strong showing here could finally put the uncertainty to rest.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:45 Recap
01:11 Meeting at Taegu
04:19 Operation Wolfhound
07:44 Collins Reports
09:35 Trouble in Paradise
12:59 Wonju
14:54 Summary
15:18 Conclusion
(more…)
“Do not give institutional power to activists” or “moral projects to bureaucrats”, but “Progressivism systematically does both”
Lorenzo Warby on the dangers of enabling totalitarians and suffering the useful idiots in any political system:
The overthrow of Robespierre in the National Convention on 27 July 1794, Max Adamo (1870),
Wikimedia Commons.
Do not give institutional power to activists, as activism — being power without responsibility that readily lauds bad behaviour — attracts manipulative “Cluster B” personalities. Moreover, activism degrades realms of human action by imposing pre-conceived outcomes and constraints on them. We can see this is in all the entertainment franchises whose internal logics of story and canon have been debauched in the service of political messaging.1
Do not give moral projects to bureaucrats, as such projects elevate the authority of the bureaucrats who become moral masters, devaluing the authority of the citizens turned into moral subjects, and so undermines any ethic of service to said citizenry. Such projects also frustrate accountability, as the grand intentions can, and will, be used to shield the bureaucrats from scrutiny. Indeed, moral projects rapidly become moralised projects, whose grand intentions protects, even aggrandise, the self-interest of the bureaucrats.2
Progressivism systematically does both — give institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats. Hence progressivism has so often proved disastrous for human flourishing. Indeed, it has a powerful tendency to use the grandeur of its moral intentions to free itself from moral constraints: to be moralised, rather than moral.
As various folk “walk away” from what left-progressivism has become, a common sentiment is some version of “this is not the Left I remember” or “this is not what the Left used to stand for”. Yet, one of the striking things about Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (aka “wokery”) within contemporary societies is how thoroughly it is replicating mechanisms of social control familiar to any student of Communism, of Marxist Party-states.
This “not the Left I joined” is typically a notion of “the Left” that does not include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu … So it is an historically illiterate, “wouldn’t-it-be-nice”, Leftism. Yet it is precisely the Left that does include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu and so on whose echoes are being played out in our societies.
When we look around our contemporary societies, we have commissars/political officers (aka DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers, bias response teams, etc); Zhdanovism, in the remarkable ideological conformism in the arts, entertainment and gaming (usefully discussed here); Lysenkoism in science journals, especially the genderwoo sex-is-non-binary nonsense, though genetics research and male-female differences also have aspects of it; and censorship that was originally paraded as stopping “hate speech”, now being purveyed as anti-dis/mis/mal-information. Critical Pedagogy — which has become influential in Education Faculties and teacher training — is explicitly about replicating Mao’s Cultural Revolution model of permanent revolution. We have the same, disastrous, patterns of institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats.
1. There is a large difference from the “we want to be included, we want a say” activism that abolished first the slave trade and then slavery, that abolished laws against Jews and Catholics, that gave us universal male and then female suffrage — what I have called the Emancipation Sequence. Such political movements included previously excluded folk in freedoms and political processes that already existed. They did not give institutional power to activists nor moral projects to bureaucrats.
2. The institutional shrinkage of the Church has not abolished the meaning-and-morality role it used to play, it has just shifted it into academe and the welfare state apparat, making both simultaneously more arrogant and less functional.
Discover the ‘Lost’ Big Dipper Rum Cocktail Recipe
Glen And Friends Cooking
Published 2 Oct 2024Today on Cocktails After Dark we explore the fascinating history of Gander Airport’s iconic Big Dipper bar, once a bustling stopover for the world’s rich and famous during the 1940s to 1960s. This video dives into the golden age of aviation when propeller planes made Gander, Newfoundland, a key refuelling point for transatlantic flights. Discover how legends like Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, and Frank Sinatra sipped cocktails at the Big Dipper while planes refuelled, and learn how to make the bar’s signature cocktail using the infamous Newfoundland Screech rum. If you’ve ever been curious about Gander’s aviation history, old-time airport bars, or unique cocktails, this video has it all. Plus, find out how “Screech” became a part of Newfoundland’s folklore. Whether you’re a history buff, cocktail enthusiast, or simply curious about this legendary airport, you won’t want to miss this journey back in time. Grab your shaker, some rum, and let’s make history — one drink at a time!
The Big Dipper
1½ ounces Newfoundland Screech
1 ounce Cointreau
¾ ounce lemon juice
1 teaspoon simple syrup
(more…)
QotD: The Who
But I’ll tell you right now, there ain’t no Moon over there. I mean, good Lord: OF COURSE Keith Moon and John Entwistle were a difficult rhythm section for a guitarist to play in front of. Have you listened to those records? Professionals have talked about how watching Moon play up close was an exercise in constant suspense — you would see him take off at the start of the bar and go roaming around the drum kit and wonder how he could possibly make it back in time. He usually did make it — when he wasn’t so zonked he was falling off his stool, which is also a thing that happened sometimes.
This intricate, frantic quality is what made Moon the most inimitable of the great rock drummers — someone whose style you could recognize in a matter of seconds if he were playing on biscuit tins — but the difficulty of playing in front of a notional “timekeeper” so adventurous, and particularly doing it in concert, ought to be self-evident.
The standard advice for a rock guitarist in this predicament would be to make sure he had a very steady, unadventurous bass player to anchor the group. And the bassists for many excellent groups do, in fact, secretly stick to four or five notes they’re real comfortable with. But Entwistle offered Moon-like challenges as part of a rhythm section, albeit without inducing the same terror. At any moment his left hand might start leaping like a salmon on the fretboard, and if he played half notes in one bar, this was no guarantee he wouldn’t be doing startling, blinding sixteenths in the next.
That’s what makes Who records Who records; that’s what lifts the best ones above even the empyrean level of Townshend’s songwriting. But it meant, as Pete explained in his apology, that he could never step out and “shred” as a guitarist. The entire structure of the traditional rock group was topsy-turvy with the Who, and Townshend, whose ego is at least as big as the next fellow’s (spoiler: it’s bigger), was forced in some regard to be the responsible one, the custodian of the rhythm.
Colby Cosh, “Leave Pete Townshend alone!”, National Post, 2019-11-29.
January 21, 2025
Claim – First Nations lived sustainably and harmoniously with their natural environment. Reality – “Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump”
Pim Wiebel contrasts how children are taught about how First Nations before contact with Europeans were living fully sustainable lives in a kind of Garden of Eden until the white snakes man arrived and the rather less Edenic reality:
Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump near Fort McLeod, Alberta.
Photo by Mike via Wikipedia Commons.
Among the many “proofs” offered in First Nations circles to support the claim of a pre-contact Eden imbued with an ethos of environmental harmony, is the idea that before the Europeans arrived, the buffalo was considered sacred, treated with great respect, and killed only in numbers that would sustain it in perpetuity.
Each of these notions require scrutiny.
For the Great Plains tribes, the buffalo was an essential source of food and of materials for tools, clothing and lodges. It is unsurprising that the buffalo featured prominently in tribal mythology. Among the Blackfoot, the animal was considered Nato’ye (of the Sun) sacred and to have great power. Buffalo skulls were placed at the top of the medicine lodges and prominently featured at communal ceremonies.
It is ubiquitously asserted that the tribes only killed as many buffalo as they needed for their sustenance between hunts, and that every part of the animal was used. A Canadian history website suggests, “The buffalo hunt was a major community effort and every part of the slaughtered animal was used“. An American publication states, presumptuously: “It’s one of the cliches of the West; Native Americans used all the parts of the buffalo. It’s something that almost everyone knows, whether you are interested in history or not.” The Assembly of First Nations weighs in, teaching Canadian school children in their heavily promoted “Learning Modules”, that “Hunters took only what was necessary to survive. Every part of the animal was used.”
But was the Indigenous relationship with the buffalo in reality one of supreme reverence? Was every part of the animal used, and were the buffalo always killed only in numbers that would satisfy immediate needs while ensuring the sustainability of the herds?
The evidence suggests something quite different.
Archaeologists have studied ancient buffalo “jump sites”, places where Indigenous bands hunted buffalo herds by driving them over high cliffs. Investigations of sites from the Late Archaic period (1000 B.C. to 700 A.D.) reveal that many more buffalo than could be used were killed and that rotting heaps of only partially butchered bison carcasses were left behind.
Buffalo jumps continued to be used as a hunting method long after first contact with Europeans. Early Canadian fur trader and explorer Alexander Henry, made the following entry on May 29th, 1805 in his diary of travels in the Missouri country: “Today we passed on the Stard. (starboard) side the remains of a vast many mangled carcasses of Buffaloe which had been driven over a precipice of 120 feet by the Indians and perished; the water appeared to have washed away a part of this immense pile of slaughter and still there remained the fragments of at least a hundred carcasses they created a most horrid stench. In this manner the Indians of the Missouri distroy vast herds of buffaloe at a stroke.”
Alexander Henry described how the buffalo jump unfolded. The hunters approached the herd from the rear and sides, and chased it toward a cliff. A particularly agile young man disguised in a buffalo head and robe positioned himself between the herd and the cliff edge, luring the animals forward. Henry was told on one occasion that the decoy sometimes met the same fate as the buffalo: “The part of the decoy I am informed is extremely dangerous if they are not very fleet runers the buffaloe tread them under foot and crush them to death, and sometimes drive them over the precipice also, where they perish in common with the buffaloe.”
The Blackfoot called their jump sites Pishkun, meaning “deep blood kettle”. It is not difficult to imagine the horrendous bawling of the animals that suffered physical trauma from the fall but did not immediately succumb. Did the hunters have the ability, or even make an attempt, to put them out of their misery with dispatch? We do not know.
QotD: Raw democracy
(And this is what our political, economic and media elites want to export across the globe?)
Doug Newman, “An Understatement: The Founding Fathers Hated Democracy”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-08-14.
January 20, 2025
“You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes”
Kat Rosenfield shares her concerns about what the accusations against Neil Gaiman indicate about the problems with allowing women to be legally unreliable narrators:
There’s a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he’s doing. Gaiman says he’s struggling: he’s heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. “I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed,” he writes.
“It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.
Except: she doesn’t mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much:
Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him.
But also, we know this because she didn’t mean it is sort of an ongoing theme, here. And that’s what I want to talk about.
By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)
Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.
Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.
The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.
Substack
I subscribe to a lot of other folks’ Substack blogs and I’ve been linking to a lot of posts there over the last year or so. It’s a very good site and you’re bound to find things of interest there if you like some of the things I’ve been linking to.
If you would like notifications/summaries of posts here but don’t want to check in every day, you can subscribe to my Substack at https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson as I mail out a daily update with links to all of the day’s blog posts. For example, yesterday’s summary looked like this:
Campo-Giro M1913 – Spain’s First Domestic Selfloader
Forgotten Weapons
Published 31 May 2015The Campo-Giro was Spain’s first indigenous self-loading military pistol, adopted in 1912 to replace the Belgian 1908 Bergmann-Mars. Only a small number were made of the original M1913 variety, with the vast majority being the later and slightly more refined M1913/16. This particular example is an early one, and particularly interesting to look at for that reason. The gun is a straight blowback design in 9mm Largo, and only lasted as Spain’s standard pistol until its descendent, the Astra 400, was adopted in 1921.
QotD: Brainwashing
Like Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (another must-read), I read Meerloo years ago, so my recall of the details is fuzzy, but the upshot is obvious: The techniques of “brainwashing” have been known since at least the Middle Ages, and they’re still the same. Suspected witches in the Early Modern period, for instance, got Der Prozess, and though the witch hunters also had recourse to the rack and thumbscrews and all the rest, none of it was really necessary — isolation, starvation, and sleep deprivation work even better, provided you hit that sweet spot when they’re just starting to go insane …
I’m being deliberately flip about a horrible thing, comrades, because as no doubt distasteful as that is to read, the fact is, we’re doing it to ourselves, everywhere, all the time. Not the starvation part, obviously, but we eat such horribly unnatural diets that our minds are indeed grossly affected. Want proof? Go hardcore keto for a week and watch what happens. Or if that’s too much, you can simulate the experience by going cold turkey off caffeine. I promise you, by the end of day two you’d give the NKVD the worst dirt on your own mother if they sat a steaming hot cup of java in front of you.
Severian, “Kickin’ It Old Skool”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-04.
January 19, 2025
Mark Carney is a serious man … that doesn’t mean he’d be a good political leader
The Line‘s Jen Gerson likes Mark Carney, but she hastens to add that this isn’t necessarily good news for Mr. Carney as she felt the same way about Jim Prentice who was very briefly Premier of Alberta but “demonstrated the political nous of a chicken nugget” and quickly was out of power:
Then-Governor of the Bank of Canada Mark Carney at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
WEF photo via Wikimedia Commons.
I learned the most valuable lesson from that period of political reporting, one I try to carry with me unto this very day: Never, never let one’s personal feelings about an individual candidate corrupt one’s political analysis. And if you think about it, this is a very important lesson to learn.
I am not a normal person. That which appeals to me is very unlikely to find purchase with sane, feeling voters who hold ordinary jobs and live lives filled with meaningful human connections and real, not-political conversations.
I was thinking about this as I watched Mark Carney announce his intention to run as Liberal leader in Edmonton on Thursday. Carney is a serious man. He has a real CV and a long list of meaningful accomplishments. He’s a man who seems to understand that the “good old times are over”. He’s a man who has navigated several international crises — as he was keen to point out. He’s a man who despises the excesses of both the right and the left. He’s a man who is is focused on building Canada’s economy.
He’s a man who has correctly identified one of the Conservatives’ core weaknesses, their tendency to channel legitimate anger and grievance into thin slogans that offer few substantive plans toward the kinds of significant changes that this country will be required to make. The fact that Carney is making this critique while coming to the fore without offering any substantive plans of his own is only to be expected considering the timeline’s he’s working with, I suppose.
Regardless, Carney is giving Jim Prentice Energy. Jean Charest Energy. Jeb! Energy.
I like him.
[…]
For that matter, if Carney wants to present himself as a strong supporter of Canada, a defender of our sovereignty in the face of America’s re-articulated expansionist ambitions, why did he preempt his leadership launch with an appearance on The Daily Show? What message are we to take from this: that Carney is well liked and respected by the American political milieu that was roundly trounced by Donald Trump?
It doesn’t signal a lot of faith in Canada as a cohesive cultural concept to soft launch your political leadership campaign through a marshmallow chat with an American comedy host. (As an aside, I realize that foreigners aren’t real to Americans, but I’m begging literally any television journalist on a mainstream U.S. network to stop treating our politicians like kawaii pets [Wiki] on loan from a northern Democrat utopia that exists only in their minds. These people can handle hard questions — even about matters that are important to an American audience; like, for example, Canada’s delinquent NATO spending.)
Did Mark Carney not believe that the CBC that I presume he will be campaigning to preserve was up to the challenge of doing the first interview with him? Look, I wouldn’t turn down a chat at Jon Stewart’s table if I got the call, but if the best possible way to reach potential Liberal leadership voters in 2025 is to pop onto American TV, we might as well pack it in, call ourselves 51 and be done with it.
By the way, in case anyone hasn’t yet pointed it out; the average age of a Daily Show audience member is 63. The audience is in steep decline, and it doesn’t even air on any Canadian TV channels anymore. To watch the Carney clip, Canadians have to seek it out on Apple TV or YouTube. Usually the day after because the target demo is usually in bed by 9 p.m. MST now.
Dozens of Dead Tiger Tanks at Prokhorovka? – Prokhorovka Part 6
World War Two
Published 18 Jan 2025As the dust settles on the fields of Prokhorovka, Indy takes a look at the losses suffered by the Red Army and the Waffen-SS. But we soon see that Rotmistrov and the Soviets have launched a calculated propaganda operation to distort the numbers and paint the battle as a crushing victory.
(more…)
