Quotulatiousness

December 11, 2024

Canada’s current situation, as viewed by Fortissax

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Government, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Fortissax recently spoke to an audience in Toronto. This is part of the transcript of his speech:

No doubt, many of you already have an idea.

The fact of the matter is this: 25% of the people in this country are, or soon will be, foreigners. Most of them are not the children of immigrants but fresh-off-the-boat migrants.

The economy? It’s in the dumps. Canada has the lowest upward mobility in the OECD for young people. One of the lowest fertility rates in the Western world. And the fastest-changing demographics in the Western world — as I’m sure you’ve all noticed here in the streets of Toronto, the old capital of Anglo-Canadians.

Think about this: approximately 4.9 million foreigners are classified as “temporary migrants.” Combine that with permanent residents, refugees, and immigrants, and that number swells to 6.2 million in just four years.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Crime is reportedly the highest it’s ever been. We have no military. The Canadian Armed Forces has faced retention issues for two decades. And what is command preoccupied with? Men’s bathrooms stocked with tampons and servicemen being “radicalized” by wearing extremist clothing like MAGA hats.

Let’s not forget foreign influence.

The Chinese Communist Party exploited the Hong Kong handover in the 1990s to infiltrate Canada, using British Columbia as their foothold. As Sam Cooper exposes in Claws of the Panda and Willful Blindness, they established a stronghold in Metro Vancouver, taking over the business community.

This “Vancouver Model”, as we Canadians ironically call it, normalizes our capitulation to foreign hostiles. Triads, working hand-in-glove with the Chinese communists, built a global drug empire. Fentanyl, mass-produced in football field-sized factories in China, is shipped to Vancouver and distributed across the entire Western Hemisphere.

Let this sink in: more Canadians have died from this economic warfare than all our soldiers lost in the Second World War.

And now, there’s India.

Intelligence agencies from the Republic of India have demonstrated their ability to conduct assassinations on Canadian soil. Recently, a Khalistani nationalist and separatist was killed — a figure I’ll leave to your sympathies or judgments. Regardless, this marks a disturbing shift.

India weaponizes its diaspora against the international community. In exchange for non-alignment with China, the West — particularly the Anglosphere — uses Indian migrants as wage-slave labor to suppress costs.

The result? A disaster.

In Canada, Australia, the U.K., and increasingly the United States, we see Indians climbing the ladders of power, pursuing their own interests — often brazenly. In Brampton, part of Greater Toronto, a 50-foot statue of the Hindu god Hanuman looms.

And let’s not forget the Punjabi Sikh population. They openly support an independent Khalistan — or remain at best indifferent to the cause. They have infiltrated Canada’s state apparatus, even reaching the Ministry of National Defense, where Harjit Sajjan prioritized rescuing Afghan Sikhs during Kabul operations over broader Canadian interests.

In Surrey, British Columbia, the trucking industry is effectively controlled by Sikhs. In online spaces, Sikh nationalists demand Brampton be recognized as a province, seemingly aware that their homeland exists more abroad than in Punjab itself. The leader of the NDP, Jagmeet Singh, serves as yet another example — barred from entering India due to his sympathies for separatism.

But foreign influence is only half the story. Among our own lies another problem: disintegration.

Decades of Western alienation and economic parasitism by the federal government are fueling separatist movements in places like Alberta and Saskatchewan. In Quebec, the Parti Québécois is polling higher than the ruling CAQ, openly advocating for secession from Confederation.

Meanwhile, the federal Conservatives court immigrant voters, alienating native Canadians and abandoning their base.

And then there’s the economic misery.

The average Canadian home costs $700,000. The median income? Just $48,000. Upward mobility is nonexistent. The managerial regime hoards wealth and power, gatekeeping opportunity through credentialism, exorbitant tuition, and crushing taxes.

55% of Canadians have post-secondary education, and yet most have nothing to show for it. The regime is not run by titans of intelligence or visionaries. It’s run by ideologues — loyal to their cause, not to competence or merit.

The final insult: demographics.

Over the next six years, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba will become majority non-Canadian. The 50% threshold will be breached, with profound consequences for local politics.

Ontario will hover just above 50%, while Quebec and the Maritime provinces will remain over 70% and 80% Canadian, respectively. This is not a death sentence, but it is a profound transformation for Western Canada, which has historically been more propositional and less identitarian than the East.

This is where we are.

Our sovereignty is compromised. Our identity is eroded. But we are not yet defeated. What happens next depends entirely on us.

The Korean War 025 – UN Forces Abandon Pyongyang – December 10, 1950

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 10 Dec 2024

This week, UN forces in the west pull out of the North Korean capital Pyongyang. In the east, the marines continue to fight their way towards safety. Over in Washington, the aftershocks of the Chinese intervention have shaken high command as much as they have the troops on the ground, and America’s allies, especially Britain, grow alarmed over the US response.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:26 Recap
01:20 The Blame Game
03:58 Retreat in the West
07:43 The Chinese Situation
10:59 Escaping Chosin
13:57 Atoms and Attlees
18:07 Summary
18:20 Conclusion
(more…)

Norway finds the perfect tool to drive away those pesky entrepreneurs

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

Don’t you just hate having all these bothersome start-up companies in your country, creating new jobs and new investment opportunities? Norway sure does, but good news: they’ve found an almost perfect way to not only deter existing entrepreneurs but to punish those who try to leave after they’ve been successful:

Norway is a fantastically beautiful country, but lately they’ve decided they want as few new companies as possible.
“Norway” by Nouhailler is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Norway’s entrepreneurs are disappearing. In the past two years alone, 100 of Norway’s top 400 taxpayers, representing about 50 percent of that group’s wealth, have fled the country to protect their businesses.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand paints a vivid picture of a dystopian society where government overreach and socialist policies kill innovation and demonize entrepreneurs. Present-day Norway mirrors this scenario in unsettling ways. The Nordic countries have long operated on an egalitarian ideal—citizens pay high tax rates for a generous safety net and effective public services. But Norway has taken the ideal to destructive and bizarre extremes.

Norway spends 45 percent more than Sweden on healthcare per capita with approximately the same health outcomes. Norway spends 50 percent more than Finland on primary and secondary school with worse results. And it splurges on green virtue-signaling with, for example, a $3.2 billion offshore wind project that industry experts believe is financially unworkable. That $3.2 billion, by the way, is roughly equivalent to the total revenue raised by the wealth tax.

To socialist politicians in Norway, entrepreneurs are mere piggy banks to be raided for ever more spending. When confronted with the reality that you can’t pay taxes with money you don’t have, the response is a vague moralism like “those with the broadest shoulders must bear the heaviest burdens.” Any dissent is waved away, deemed invalid because. . . free healthcare.

Earlier this year, instead of scaling back the tax blowout, the government doubled down, not only increasing the wealth tax but adding a vise grip on business owners in the form of an “exit tax” on unrealized gains as well. That means if you move from Norway, you’re immediately liable to pay 38 percent of the market value of your assets. It doesn’t matter if you have no cash on hand, if your assets are risky and could plummet in value, or even if your company fails after you leave—you still owe the tax. (Luckily for me, I left before this tax became law.)

The intent is to corral entrepreneurs inside Norway, impeding them from heading for the exits. The inevitable result: They’ll leave even before starting their businesses. After shooting itself in one foot, the government is now aiming a bazooka at the other one.

Rome: Part 5 – Between Two Wars, 241-218 BC

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

seangabb
Published Jul 21, 2024

This course provides an exploration of Rome’s formative years, its rise to power in the Mediterranean, and the exceptional challenges it faced during the wars with Carthage.

Lecture 5: Between Two Wars (241-218 BC)

• Carthage after the First Punic War
• Carthaginian Expansion into Spain
• Rome and the East
• Rome and the Gauls
• The Emergence of Hannibal
• The Outbreak of the Second Punic War
(more…)

QotD: Simon Leys on George Orwell

Filed under: Books, Britain, China, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the very title of one of his essays, “The Art of Interpreting Non-Existent Inscriptions Written in Invisible Ink on a Blank Page”, tells you the essentials of what you needed to know about the decipherment of publications coming out of China and the kind of regime that made such an arcane art necessary, and why anyone who took official declarations at face value was at best naive and at worst a knave or a fool.

What Leys wrote in 1984 in a short book about George Orwell might just as well have been written about him: “In contrast to certified specialists and senior academics, he saw the evidence in front of his eyes; in contrast to wily politicians and fashionable intellectuals, he was not afraid to give it a name; and in contrast to the sociologists and political scientists, he knew how to spell it out in understandable language.”

Leys drew a distinction between simplicity and simplification: Orwell had the first without indulgence in the second. Again, the same might be said of Leys — who, of course, like Orwell, had taken a pseudonym, and with whose work there were many parallels in his own.

But immense as was Leys’s achievement in destroying the ridiculous illusions of Western intellectuals, as Orwell had tried to do before him, it was a task thrust upon him by circumstance rather than one that he would have chosen for himself. He was by nature an aesthete and a man of letters, and I confess that great was my surprise (and pleasurable awe) when I discovered that he was, in addition to being a great sinologist, a great literary essayist.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Rare and Common Sense”, First Things, 2017-11.

December 10, 2024

Countering the “Managerial Revolution”

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall discusses the rise of the managerial class — described in 1941’s Managerial Revolution by James Burnham — and how detrimental to individual enterprises and the wider economy managerialism has been:

This, rather joyously, explains a lot about the modern world. We could go back to the mid-1980s and the bloke who ran the ‘baccy company written up in Barbarians at the Gates. In which he, as CEO, had a fleet of private planes, the company paid for his 11 country club memberships and so on. His salary was decent, sure, but the corporation rented him all the trappings of a Gatsbyesque — and successful — capitalist. Until the actual capitalists — the barbarians — turned up at those gates and started demanding shareholder returns.

Or we can think of the bureaucratic classes in the UK in more recent decades. Moving effortlessly between this NGO, that quasi-governmental body and a little light sitting on the right government inquiry. All at £1500 a day and a damn good pension to follow.

Or, you know, adapt the base idea to taste. There really is a bureaucratic and managerial class that gains the incomes and power of the capitalists of the past without having to do anything quite so grubby as either risk their own money or, actually, do anything. They, umm, administer, and the entire class is wholly and absolutely convinced that everything must be administered and they’re the right people to be doing that.

You know, basically David Cameron. Met him once, when he was just down from uni. At a political meeting – drinkies for the Tory activists in a particular council ward, possibly a little wider than that. Hated him on sight which I agree has saved me much time over the decades. And I was right too. There is nothing to Cameroonism other than that the right sort of people should be administering — the managerial revolution.

Sure, sure, we used to have the aristocracy which assumed the same thing but we did used to insist that they could chop someone’s head off first — show they had the capability. Also, they didn’t complain nor demand a pension when we did that to them if they lost office.

But the bit that really strikes me. France — and thereby the European Union — seems to me to be where this Managerial Revolution has gone furthest. Get through the right training (the “enarques“) and you’re the right guy to be a Minister, run a political party, manage the oil company, sort out the railways etc. You don’t have to succeed or fail at any of them, you’re one of the gilded class that runs the place. Because, you know, everything needs to be run and one of this class should do so.

The divergence or even active conflict of interests between the owners and the non-owning managers is part of the larger Principal-Agent Problem.

Microsoft has launched a publishing arm called “8080 Books” – AI-generated books anyone?

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

Ted Gioia notices that Microsoft and other tech companies are moving into book publishing, likely as a way to generate some additional revenue from their vast investments in artificial intelligence ventures over the last several years:

I never expected Microsoft to enter the book business.

But on November 18, this huge tech company quietly announced that it is now a publisher. But there was an interesting twist.

Microsoft is “not currently accepting unsolicited manuscripts”.

Let’s be totally fair. Nobody at Microsoft claims that it plans to replace human writers with AI slop. But this company has invested a staggering $13 billion in AI — it’s their top priority as a corporation.

So what you do think their goals are in the book business?

If you’re looking for a clue, I note that Microsoft’s publishing arm is called 8080 Books. Yes, they named it after the 8080 microprocessor.

How charming!

And just a few hours after Microsoft announced this move, TikTok did the exact same thing.

According to The Bookseller:

    ByteDance, the company behind the video-sharing platform TikTok, has announced that it will start selling print books in bookshops from early next year, published under its imprint, 8th Note Press. 8th Note Press will work in partnership with Zando to publish print editions and sell copies in physical bookstores starting early 2025.

Here, too, nobody is claiming that they will replace humans with bots. But why would a company that has built its empire with online social media have any interest in the slow and stodgy business of selling printed books on paper?

Oh, by the way, TikTok’s parent is investing huge sums in AI. The company has even found a way around export controls on Nvidia chips. Just a few weeks before entering the book business, ByteDance’s sourcing of AI tech from Huawei was leaked to the press.

And as if these coincidences weren’t enough to alarm you, another AI publishing development happened at this same time — but (here too) with very little coverage in the media.

Tech startup Spines raised $16 million in seed financing for an AI publishing business that aims to release 8,000 books per year.

Here, too, the company says that it wants to support human writers. Maybe it will run a new kind of vanity publishing business. But is that a sufficient lure to attract $16 million in seed financing?

It’d be a rearguard action, but it’d be nice to have a requirement that publishers disclose when published works are partly or wholly AI-extruded, wouldn’t it? It would certainly help me to avoid buying books or magazines where AI hallucinations may occur in key sections …

M47 – The Most Boring Tank Ever? | Tank Chat #178

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

The Tank Museum
Published Aug 9, 2024

The US built M47 probably isn’t the most interesting tank in history – but it was a vital part of NATO’s Cold War tank force.

Rushed into production at the outbreak of the Korean War, it never saw active service with the US military and was quickly superseded by the M48.

But large numbers were supplied to US Allies around the world – with Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Jordan, Pakistan and Austria being among the most significant users.

Probably the most famous M47 crewman of all, Arnold Schwarzenegger, served on the tank during his National Service.

00:00 | Intro
01:05 | M46 Sees Service in Korea
02:56 | Development Problems – And a Stop Gap
10:57 | Short Lived US service
12:47 | But An Export Success
15:24 | M47 plugs the gap for the US Army – goes on to serve abroad
15:46 | The Tank Museum’s M47 Restoration Project
(more…)

QotD: Nuclear deterrence and the start of the Cold War

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, Russia, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Understanding the development of US nuclear doctrine and NATO requires understanding the western allies’ position after the end of WWII. In Britain, France and the United States, there was no political constituency, after the war was over, to remain at anything like full mobilization and so consequently the allies substantially demobilized following the war. By contrast, the USSR did not demobilize to anything like the same degree, leaving the USSR with substantial conventional military superiority in Eastern Europe (in part because, of course, Stalin and later Soviet leaders did not have to cater to public sentiment about defense spending). The USSR also ended the war having annexed several countries in whole or in part (including eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, parts of Finland and bits of Romania) and creating non-democratic puppet governments over much of the rest of Eastern Europe. American fears that the USSR planned to attempt to further extend its control were effectively confirmed in 1948 by the Russian-backed coup in Czechoslovakia creating communist one-party rule there and by the June 1948 decision by Stalin to begin the Berlin Blockade in an effort to force the allies from Berlin as a prelude to bringing all of Germany, including the allied sectors which would become West Germany (that is, the Federal Republic of Germany).

It’s important, I think, for us to be clear-eyed here about what the USSR was during the Cold War – while the USSR made opportunistic use of anti-imperialist rhetoric against western powers (which were, it must be noted, also imperial powers), the Soviet Union was also very clearly an empire. Indeed, it was an empire of a very traditional kind, in which a core demographic (ethnic Russians were substantially over-represented in central leadership) led by an imperial elite (Communist party members) extracted resources, labor and manpower from a politically subordinated periphery (both the other Soviet Socialist Republics that composed the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries) for the benefit of the imperial elite and the core. While the USSR presented itself as notionally federal in nature, it was in fact extremely centralized and dominated by a relatively small elite.

So when Western planners planned based on fears that the highly militarized expansionist territorial empire openly committed to an expansionist ideology and actively trying to lever out opposing governments from central (not eastern) Europe might try to expand further, they weren’t simply imagining things. This is not to say everything they did in response was wise, moral or legal; much of it wasn’t. There is a certain sort of childish error which assumes that because the “West” did some unsavory things during the Cold War, that means that the threat of the Soviet Union wasn’t real; we must put away such childish things. The fear had a very real basis.

Direct military action against the USSR with conventional forces was both politically unacceptable even before the USSR tested its first nuclear weapons – voters in Britain, France or the United States did not want another world war; two was quite enough – and also militarily impossible as Soviet forces in Europe substantially outnumbered their Western opponents. Soviet leaders, by contrast, were not nearly so constrained by public opinion (as shown by their strategic decision to limit demobilization, something the democracies simply couldn’t do).

This context – a west (soon to be NATO) that is working from the assumption that the USSR is expansionist (which it was) and that western forces would be weaker than Soviet forces in conventional warfare (which they were) – provides the foundation for how deterrence theory would develop.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.

December 9, 2024

“Take the lecture, America. This person is tired of you being so weird all the time”

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

Chris Bray checks in on the vocational mental health clinic known as the New York Times:

Non-binary New York Times op-ed writer M Gessen

A cruel government official absolutely brutalized and devastated some journalists this week, in a horrifying showdown that the New York Times op-ed writer M Gessen bravely describes this morning:

    Shortly before allowing reporters into the main chamber of the Supreme Court for oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a court employee asked us all if we needed to use a bathroom. The men’s room was right next door, the staff member said, and the women’s room down the hall.

    “Where should nonbinary people go?” one of the reporters asked.

    An uncomfortable back-and-forth followed. The staff person seemed not to understand the question. In the end, there was no answer. It just didn’t seem to compute.

The men’s room is over there, the Nazi said, not even seeing what a vicious act this was.

This is the lede; given the richest real estate in journalism, Gessen opens a discussion of a Supreme Court case with the story of victims denied the right to drop a deuce in a manner that fully provides them with the rich tapestry of social equity. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it apparently bends toward just using a gendered toilet stall to wipe your ass. The piece goes on the warn about the American descent into Trumpian autocracy, in case you hadn’t guessed.

After an election season in which Tim Walz, of all people, was sent out to sell the narrative that JD Vance, of all people, was deeply weird and socially marginal, I constantly find myself seeing representations of strangeness and darkness and cruelty and horror that make me … shrug? “Which part is the bad part?”

I mentioned this yesterday, but I’m fixating this morning on the journalist who just crushed Pete Hegseth, just absolutely caught his ass, dead to rights, and bragged that she had the receipts. Mic drop, bitch — she got you! Your deviant behavior is on video. And then you watch the video, and it’s some way-obvious dads drinking a glass of whiskey together, obviously sober and acting with restraint, in a dead-center normal piece of social behavior.

This happens daily. HERE IS A SCARY WEIRD THING, a headline says, and I click on the link and see an unremarkable thing. The nonbinary journalist M Gessen is deeply concerned that the Supreme Court building is operated in such a bizarre way, consistent with a brutal descent into autocracy, not the socially reasonable way in which a diverse regime of toilet facilities are aligned with the infinite number of possible ways to represent your relationship to your crotch. M Gessen.

Take the lecture, America. This person is tired of you being so weird all the time.

“… liberalism has become a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses”

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

Freddie deBoer patiently explains why outrageous over-the-top emoting isn’t a useful or productive way to argue for your political views:

I’ve written several times about the phenomenon of adolescent women on TikTok pretending to have dissociative identity disorder for social media clout and attention. I’ve focused on it not because I necessarily think the issue itself is particularly important, but rather because it’s so emblematic of what liberalism has become: a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses, a collection of well-intentioned people who mistake the responsibility to fight discrimination for a broad, vague duty to shield certain groups of people from any criticism.

For the book I’m currently writing, I’m talking to a ton of people in the broad world of mental health — psychiatrists, therapists, researchers, policymakers, journalists, fellow patients — and I’ve brought up the TikTok DID community over and over again. Remarkably, not one person defends the phenomenon as a true expression of genuine illness, not even a few disability rights activists I’ve talked to, who usually have an ethic of never questioning a disability claim. Countless normie liberals I’ve chatter with, over the past several years, have also accepted my basic position that these young women don’t actually have dissociative identity disorder. But, also, almost no one is willing to affirmatively say anything about this dynamic themselves. Indeed, The Verge reported that many experts have decided that the costs of speaking out about that whole culture just aren’t worth it. And so you have a set of behaviors that no one defends but that no one feels comfortable criticizing, thanks to the pathologies of 21st century liberalism and online rage. That’s what I’m really here to talk to you about today.

I don’t, of course, want to be too harsh on the individual young women who have turned a debilitating and controversial disorder into an opportunity to put on vertical video fashion shows; they’re just kids and kids do stupid shit, sometimes even genuinely offensive shit. What you usually have, or used to have, is the ability to tell someone doing stupid shit to knock it off. Not oppress anyone, not humiliate anyone, not permanently shun anyone. But just to say, “You don’t have dissociative identity disorder, pretending you do is unhealthy and offensive towards people who actually have serious mental illnesses, knock it off“. I find that very easy to say. But clearly a lot of people don’t, and the reasons are fairly obvious. First, despite whatever vibe shift we may be living through, it remains the case that in progressive discursive spaces, saying the wrong thing is still very fraught and can result in accusations of bigotry that are personally and professionally damaging. Second, liberals have trained themselves to avoid any position at all that might be construed as siding with the enemy, as a matter of in-group identification. Take it from me: “A lot of people in Gen Z appear to be lacking in emotional resilience, in a way that’s unhealthy for them” has become, in the internet-soaked mind, “Gen Z is a bunch of snowflakes”, and so a ton of liberals recoil at that idea. Can’t appear to make a concession to the enemy! I’m afraid we do not have a vocabulary for critical solidarity anymore.

All of this is bad, and you only have to look at how incredibly harsh certain slices of “queer fandom” can be to see what I’m talking about.

Public wash-house Liverpool (1959) | BFI National Archive

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

BFI
Published Dec 12, 2017

Admire the industriousness of the Liverpool women who transport huge bundles of laundry to and from the local wash-house every week, crammed into old prams or balanced skilfully on their heads. The wash-house doubles as a social hub for the women, with a cafe and creche facilities. At the time of filming, this one in the Pontack Lane area was one of 13 remaining original public wash-houses in the city, although new more modernised buildings were under construction. Liverpool’s last working wash-house closed in 1995.

The peppy documentary not only looks at the modern wash-house, but introduces the story of Kitty Wilkinson, “the Saint of the Slums”, who pioneered the public wash-house movement in Liverpool during the 1832 cholera epidemic. John Abbot Productions, who made the film, specialised in sponsored non-fiction films from the late 1950s to the late 1970s.
(more…)

QotD: The downfall of Boeing

Filed under: Books, Business, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Boeing was once a young startup, founded by the eccentric heir to a timber fortune. Through a mixture of luck, derring-do, and frequent cash injections from its wealthy patron, it managed to avoid bankruptcy long enough for World War II to begin, at which point the military contracts started rolling in. Along the way, it developed an engineer-dominated, technically perfectionist, highly deliberative corporate culture. At one time, you could have summed it up by saying it was the Google of its time, but alas there are problems with that analogy these days. Maybe we should say it was the “circa 2005 Google” of its time.

There’s a lot to love about an engineer-dominated corporate culture. For starters, it has a tendency to overengineer things, and when those things are metal coffins with hundreds of thousands of interacting components, filled with people and screaming through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, maybe overengineering isn’t so bad. These cultures also tend to be pretty innovative, and sure enough Boeing invented the modern jet airliner and then revolutionized it several times.

But there are also downsides. As any Googler will tell you, these companies usually have a lot of fat to trim. Some of what looks like economic inefficiency is actually vital seed corn for the innovations of the future, but some of it is also just inefficiency, because nobody looks at the books, because it isn’t that kind of company. Likewise, being highly deliberative about everything can lead to some really smart decision making and avoidance of group think, but it can also be a cover for laziness or for an odium theologicum that ensures nothing ever gets done. Smart managers steeped in this sort of culture can usually do a decent job of sorting the good from the bad, but only if they can last, because you see there’s a third problem, which is that almost everybody involved is a quokka.

Engineers, being a subspecies of nerds, are bad at politics. In 1996, Boeing did something very stupid and acquired a company that was good at politics. McDonnell Douglas, another airplane maker, wasn’t the best at making airplanes, but was very good at lobbying congress and at impressing Wall Street analysts. Boeing took over the company, but pretty much everybody agrees that when the dust had settled it was actually McDonnell Douglas that had taken over Boeing. One senior Boeing leader lamented that the McDonnell Douglas executives were like “hunter killer assassins”. No, sorry bro, I don’t think they were actually that scary, you were just a quokka.

Anyway, the hunter killer assassins ran amok: purging rivals, selling off assets, pushing through stock buybacks, and outsourcing or subcontracting everything that wasn’t nailed down. They had a fanaticism for capital efficiency that rose to the level of a monomania,1 which maybe wasn’t the best fit for an airplane manufacturer. And slowly but surely, everything went off the rails. Innovation stopped, the culture withered, and eventually planes started falling out of the sky. And now the big question, the question Robison just can’t figure out. Why?

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Flying Blind by Peter Robison”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-06.

    1. This is how you know this story took place in an era of high interest rates!

December 8, 2024

The potential for retribution in a second Trump presidency

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

Francis Christian meditates on whether or how President-elect Donald Trump will indulge in eye-for-an-eye revenge against the individuals most clearly involved in the lawfare and other attempts to derail his re-election:

It was the English poet Alexander Pope who admonished us in the manner of the New Testament that “to err is human; to forgive, divine” — Errare humanum est, ignoscere divino.

The Old Testament in contrast, has the equally familiar and perhaps far more popular, “eye for an eye“, and in one of the most revolutionary statements ever uttered, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount talked about us “having heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye’ — but I say unto you, love your enemies“.

To wish to take revenge upon one’s enemies is therefore human, but Jesus is asking mankind to rise above this basic instinct and instead, to forgive and love one’s enemies. This was all of course part of His Mission on earth — to change by His Life, His Cross and the Resurrection, the destiny of human beings from being bound to basic instincts and death — to being bound for eternal life, a different destiny and a new creation.

The mavens of Hollywood of course march to a different and more ancient tune (which has been handed down unchanged to them) and generations of movie goers and consumers of media have been brought up on the idea that revenge of the most explosively visceral kind is a good thing, even a noble thing.

My readers will undoubtedly have their own sincerely held beliefs about Jesus’ command to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us and once again, I do not wish this essay to turn out to be a sermon! What I wish to address instead, is to ask the question: what is the place for retribution, vengeance and revenge in the conduct of statecraft?

In other words, when President elect Trump said in a recently widely publicized interview that he was, “not looking for retribution, grandstanding or to destroy people who treated me very unfairly“, was he declaring a principle of statecraft that makes for a fulfilling and productive Presidency? And is this also a principle of statecraft that will “make American great again?”

In typical, inimitable and endearing Trumpian fashion, the President-elect also added the tongue in cheek comment: “I am always looking to give a second and even third chance, but never willing to give a fourth chance — that is where I hold the line!”

It could be argued from the life of no less a colossal figure than Julius Caesar that decisive and devastating revenge upon one’s enemies makes for a strong and respected ruler and nation. Whilst still a private citizen, Julius Caesar was captured by pirates on the way to the Greek island of Rhodes (to which he was travelling in order to learn oratory from the famous professor Molon). Caesar raised his own ransom — then raised a naval force, captured his pirate captors and had them all crucified.

The later assassination of Caesar and the subsequent civil wars that rocked and roiled Rome is the subject of Shakespeare’s magnificent, Tragedy of Julius Caesar. The subsequent rule of Augustus Caesar was marked by stability, expansion of the empire, the building of roads and bridges (via which the Gospel was to travel), the making of sea and land routes safe for travellers (again, to the advantage of the early Christians taking the Gospel to Asia and Europe) the consolidation of Roman power — and the rule of (Roman) law. It was also during the reign of this austere, learned emperor that Jesus was born in a manger, in the Roman province of Palestine.

H/T to Brian Peckford for the link.

President Hindenburg dissolves the Reichstag – Rise of Hitler 07, July 1930

Filed under: Germany, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 7 Dec 2024

July 1930 sees the Weimar Republic facing unprecedented turmoil. From Brüning’s budget crisis and the Reichstag‘s dissolution to Nazi and Communist clashes with state governments, Germany braces for a pivotal election in September. This episode unpacks the month’s chaos, political maneuvers, and the rising tensions tearing the Republic apart.
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