World War Two
Published 21 Dec 2024In the early hours of July 12, 1943, the Waffen SS and the Red Army are ready for battle. SS General Paul Hausser has his armoured spearheads ready to strike at Prokhorovka while Soviet commander Pavel Rotmistrov’s 5th Guards Tank Army readies his counterattack. Today, Indy walks you through the enormous armoured fleets deployed for the coming fight.
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December 22, 2024
Tanks Prepare for Battle! The Greatest Ever? Prokhorovka Part 2
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“It’s a major award!”
We’ve been fans of the movie A Christmas Story for many years, but I hadn’t heard this particular detail from winery owner Martin Malivoire’s end-of-year newsletter:
The Legacy of the Lamp!
As you may already know, in the years before I put my name on a winery, my profession was related to the motion picture industry.
In a pursuit spanning forty years, I collaborated with many great people. Few were as rewarding to work with as the late Bob Clark.
He was a seasoned and visionary film director, and it was at Bob’s suggestion that I undertook an unlikely project, one whose memory became the most enduring of my pre-winery career: the leg lamp made famous by the holiday film, A Christmas Story.
Why do I say “unlikely”? My expertise was in Special Effects, which I designed and executed for motion pictures, television and stage. Frequently these were loud and dramatic; I engineered fires, explosions, crashes and the like. Prop-making was a little outside my usual practice, but I happily agreed to build this one for my friend.
With a jolly demeanor and a sly smile, Bob handed me a napkin, bearing a sketch of a flamboyant light fixture. The rest is history.
A suitably proportioned young woman was hastily recruited to model for a leg mold, which was no small task, as it required immersing her entire leg, from big toe to navel, in quick-setting plaster.
From the mold, we cast a series of translucent plastic lamps. Each had to be individually crafted to the specific requirements of a scene and uniquely, meticulously illuminated by our Director of Photography. Accordingly, not one of the fixtures was a complete, C.S.A. anointed, “plug-in, switch-on”, and as Ralphie reminisces, “bask in the soft glow of electric sex” lamp.
Nonetheless, the illusion was a success. The presence of the lamp brought elements of levity, the ridiculous, fantasy and nostalgia to the film, magnified by the Director himself. Bob, as narrator, gave his own warm voice to Ralphie’s childhood memories, and made them ours.
When production wrapped, the lamps had nowhere to go. I stored them in Toronto, and for years they adorned the windows of my studio. However, the film company still owned them and when I was told to dispose of these props, I complied, leaving nothing behind.
As movies go, A Christmas Story was what we call “a sleeper”. It drew modestly on release, but grew in popularity year after year, to join the ranks of modern Christmas Classics.
We did not foresee this, nor did we foresee that of all the images generated by this now-iconic movie, the leg lamp would become its most-remembered, most-cherished, and most-copied Christmas symbol, launching a huge industry of luminous celebrations and decorative reproductions.
If we had known … well, I’m certain I’m not the only one who would have rushed back to rescue those fishnet stocking-clad plastic leg lamps from a Cherry Street dumpster.
No, I do not receive any royalties, but it gives me pleasure to see how many folks today own a modern copy of our original creation.
If you’re among them, may it light this Christmas and many more to come … and if you don’t have a leg lamp of your own, I hope that by sharing this story I’ve left you with a smile.
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Chocolate Bark – Holiday Gift Idea – Food Wishes
Food Wishes
Published 15 Dec 2017Learn how to make Chocolate Bark! This easy recipe is perfect for enjoying yourself, or to use as an edible holiday gift. Visit https://foodwishes.blogspot.com/2017/… for the ingredients, more information, and many, many more video recipes. I hope you enjoy this Chocolate Bark recipe!
In addition to sharing an easy, and beautiful edible holiday gift idea, I wanted to make this chocolate bark so I could test a simplified technique for tempering chocolate without a thermometer. It sounded too good to be true, but worked fairly well, which is the problem. Is fairly good, okay?
Properly tempered chocolate will snap when broken, and retain that gorgeous glossy sheen. Poorly tempered chocolate is sort of dull grey, and the texture is soft, and waxy. This was somewhere in the middle.
Using this method, you will get close to properly tempered chocolate, and you might get lucky, and actually end up with perfectly tempered chocolate, but in hindsight, since using a thermometer isn’t really hard, and the extra steps required not that strenuous, I’ll probably just do it the right way next time.
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QotD: “Sparta Is Terrible and You Are Terrible for Liking Sparta”
“This. Isn’t. Sparta.” is, by view count, my second most read series (after the Siege of Gondor series); WordPress counts the whole series with just over 415,000 page views as I write this, with the most popular part (outside of the first one; first posts in a series always have the most views) being the one on Spartan Equality followed by Spartan Ends (on Spartan strategic failure). The least popular is actually the fifth part on Spartan Government, which doesn’t bother me overmuch as that post was the one most narrowly focused on the spartiates (though I think it also may be the most Hodkinsonian post of the bunch, we’ll come back to that in a moment) and if one draws anything out of my approach it must be that I don’t think we should be narrowly focused on the spartiates.
In the immediate moment of August, 2019 I opted to write the series – as I note at the beginning – in response to two dueling articles in TNR and a subsequent (now lost to the ages and only imperfectly preserved by WordPress’ tweet embedding function) Twitter debate between Nick Burns (the author of the pro-Sparta side of that duel) and myself. In practice however the basic shape of this critique had been brewing for a lot longer; it formed out of my own frustrations with seeing how Sparta was frequently taught to undergraduates: students tended to be given Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus (or had it described to them) with very little in the way of useful apparatus to either question his statements or – perhaps more importantly – extrapolate out the necessary conclusions if those statements were accepted. Students tended to walk away with a hazy, utopian feel about Sparta, rather than anything that resembled either of the two main scholarly “camps” about the polis (which we’ll return to in a moment).
That hazy vision in turn was continually reflected and reified in the popular image of Sparta – precisely the version of Sparta that Nick Burns was mobilizing in his essay. That’s no surprise, as the Sparta of the undergraduate material becomes what is taught when those undergrads become high school teachers, which in turn becomes the Sparta that shows up in the works of Frank Miller, Steven Pressfield and Zack Snyder. It is a reading of the sources that is at once both gullible and incomplete, accepting all of the praise without for a moment thinking about the implications; for the sake of simplicity I’m going to refer to this vision of Sparta subsequently as the “Pressfield camp”, after Steven Pressfield, the author of Gates of Fire (1998). It has always been striking to me that for everything we are told about Spartan values and society, the actual spartiates would have despised nearly all of their boosters with sole exception of the praise they got from southern enslaver-planter aristocrats in the pre-Civil War United States. If there is one thing I wish I had emphasized more in “This. Isn’t. Sparta.” it would have been to tell the average “Sparta bro” that the Spartans would have held him in contempt.
And so for years I regularly joked with colleagues that I needed to make a syllabus for a course simply entitled, “Sparta Is Terrible and You Are Terrible for Liking Sparta”. Consequently the TNR essays galvanized an effort to lay out what in my head I had framed as “The Indictment Against Sparta”. The series was thus intended to be set against the general public hagiography of Sparta and its intended audience was what I’ve heard termed the “Sparta Bro” – the person for whom the Spartans represent a positive example (indeed, often the pinnacle) of masculine achievement, often explicitly connected to roles in law enforcement, military service and physical fitness (the regularity with which that last thing is included is striking and suggests to me the profound unseriousness of the argument). It was, of course, not intended to make a meaningful contribution to debates within the scholarship on Sparta; that’s been going on a long time, the questions by now are very technical and so all I was doing was selecting the answers I find most persuasive from the last several decades of it (evidently I am willing to draw somewhat further back than some). In that light, I think the series holds up fairly well, though there are some critiques I want to address.
One thing I will say, not that this critique has ever been made, but had I known that fellow UNC-alum Sarah E. Bond had written a very good essay for Eidolon entitled “This is Not Sparta: Why the Modern Romance With Sparta is a Bad One” (2018), I would have tried to come up with a different title for the series to avoid how uncomfortably close I think the two titles land to each other. I might have gone back to my first draft title of “The Indictment Against Sparta” though I suspect the gravitational pull that led to Bond’s title would have pulled in mine as well. In any case, Sarah’s essay takes a different route than mine (with more focus on reception) and is well worth reading.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Retrospective”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-08-19.
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December 21, 2024
German democracy tottering on the brink (again) after latest attack by Elon Musk!
Germany is, yet again, convulsed with political unrest as politicians react strongly to foreign interference in German affairs by … dun-dun-duuuuuun … Elon Musk:
German democracy, which has existed undeterred since 1949 but is somehow always shaken to its foundations whenever anybody sings the wrong song or holds a televised debate with the wrong person, is once again on life support.
Christian Lindner, head of the market-liberal Free Democrats, did much to trigger the present catastrophe on 1 December, when said that the Free Republic should “dare more Milei and more Musk“. Because there is little distinction between praising Milei and Musk and demanding the return of National Socialism, there ensued a brief period of establishment hyperventilation.
Less than a week later, CDU chief and probable future German chancellor Friedrich Merz, did his part to denounce Lindner’s political wrongthink in a statement to Deutschlandfunk:
So neither the Argentinian president nor, how shall I put it, the American entrepreneur Elon Musk – let’s put it plainly – are role models for German politics in my view. I don’t see where we can find similarities in German politics. What Christian Lindner meant will probably remain his secret.
The next day, Merz repeated the same denunciations, only more harshly, explaining to one of our extremely adult and far-sighted pantsuit talkshow hosts that “To be honest, I was completely appalled that Christian Lindner made that comparison“. Milei, Merz said, is “really trampling on the people there”.
Yesterday, all of this came to the notice of the (honestly rather tiresome) influencer Naomi Seibt, who posted a video statement to X rehearsing all of this old news to her largely American audience:
Elon Musk then brought down the hammer on the German democratic order, retweeting Seibt’s video and remarking that “Only the AfD can save Germany“.
Today a lot of very important and influential people got out of bed and took to their keyboards to denounce Musk’s election interference. His statement might be illegal, at any rate it is very likely fascist and certainly it is beyond the pale for an American to voice an opinion about German politics. Germans absolutely never, ever, utter the slightest word about American politics and certainly would never advance negative opinions about the American president in the middle of an election campaign. Our Foreign Office would never try to fact-check an American presidential debate! Our journalists would never depict President Donald Trump dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member or offering the Hitler salute or decapitating the Statue of Liberty! That’s just not done!
Like a great stream of green diarrhoea, the outrage is pouring fourth. Matthias Gebauer, who writes for Der Spiegel, observes that “Elon Musk … is openly promoting the AfD” and concludes that “Putin is not the only one who loves this party”. Erik Marquardt, head of the Green faction in the European Parliament, says that “The EU Commission and EU member states should no longer stand by and watch as billionaires misuse media and algorithms to influence elections and strengthen and normalise right-wing extremists”. This “is an attack on democracy”, and “has nothing to do with freedom of expression”. Dennis Radtke, CDU representative in the European Parliament, concludes that “Musk … is declaring war on democracy” and that “the man is a menace”. We are also under siege via “interference from Putin”; “the erosion of our democracy is being fuelled from both within and without”. Julian Röpcke, who writes for BILD, believes that “This is interference in the German election campaign by a tech billionaire who uses algorithms to decide what gets heard”. If Germany does not “respond with penalties, there will be no help for our eroding democracy”.
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The Canadian Armed Forces are doing great on diversity … but not much else
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper reports on the amazing progress in anti-racist activism, diversity, equity, inclusion and — for all I know — drag queen story times in the officers’ messes but too bad about all the other stuff, eh?
A new report finds that while the Department of Defence is making steady progress on all its new “equity and diversity” goals, morale is plummeting and the Canadian military has reached new lows in terms of its ability to actually deploy forces.
For the first time, more than half of Canada’s naval and air fleets were marked as being unfit to “meet training and readiness requirements”, according to the military’s latest Departmental Results Report, published Tuesday.
Only 45.7 per cent of Royal Canadian Navy ships are fit to be used for “training and operations”, and the same is true for just 48.9 per cent of RCAF “aerospace fleets”.
And the figures weren’t much better in the army. The report wrote that the serviceability of Canadian Army equipment remained in a “persistent downward trend”, with army personnel forced to rely on “aging and increasingly obsolete fleets”.
One example was the BV 206, a tracked snow carrier that is ostensibly the main form of transportation at the Nunavut-based Arctic Training Centre. The vehicle now has an incredible 80 per cent failure rate, with the report saying that it can’t be safely used for “essential” tasks.
Morale is also hitting new lows. In a survey, just 30.4 per cent of military personnel said that the armed forces provide a “reasonable quality of life” — that’s far less than the official target of 85 per cent.
And among full-time personnel, just 53.5 per cent said they felt “positive” about their job.
Some of the few figures in the document that weren’t in decline were in the realm of “equity and diversity”.
The Canadian Armed Forces slightly increased the share of personnel who “self-identify as a visible minority” (from 11.1 per cent in 2023 to 12.2 per cent in 2024).
There was also a moderate uptick in the number of civilian employees “who self-identify as a woman” (from 42.4 to 43 per cent).
The report boasted of a new system of military promotions that does not “disadvantage the intersections of diverse groups of women, men and non-binary people”.
It also announced that “Gender Advisors” were now being routinely deployed on overseas operations, including on Operation Unifier, Canada’s mission to provide combat training to Ukrainian soldiers engaged in their ongoing war with Russia. “The Task Force Gender Advisor was involved in all aspects of this training mission”, it read.
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Alton’s Eggnog | Food Network
Food Network
Published 1 Dec 2014Alton’s making eggnog, the drink that thinks it’s a custard pie.
Get the recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/al…
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QotD: Portugal’s early expansion in the Indian Ocean
The collision of the Iberian and Indian worlds, which possessed diplomatic and religious norms that were mutually unintelligible, was therefore bound to devolve quickly into frustration and eventually violence. The Portuguese, who harbored hopes that India might be home to Christian populations with whom they could link up, were greatly disappointed to discover only Muslims and Hindu “idolaters”. The broader problem, however, was that the market in the Malabar coast was already heavily saturated with Arab merchants who plied the trade routes from India to Egypt — indeed, these were precisely the middle men whom the Portuguese were hoping to outflank.
The particular flashpoint which led to conflict, therefore, were the mutual efforts of the Portuguese and the Arabs to exclude each other from the market, and the devolution to violence was rapid. A second Portuguese expedition, which arrived in 1500 with 13 ships, got the action started by seizing and looting an Arab cargo ship off Calicut; Arab merchants in the city responded by whipping up a mob which massacred some 70 Portuguese in the onshore trading post in full sight of the fleet. The Portuguese, incensed and out for revenge, retaliated in turn by bombarding Calicut from the sea; their powerful cannon killed hundreds and left much of the town (which was not fortified) in ruins. They then seized the cargo of some 10 Arab vessels along the coast and hauled out for home.
The 1500 expedition unveiled an emerging pattern and basis for Portugal’s emerging India project. The voyage was marked by significant frustration: in addition to the massacre of the shore party in Calicut, there were significant losses to shipwreck and scurvy, and the expedition had failed to achieve its goal of establishing a trading post and stable relations in Calicut. Even so, the returns — mainly spices looted from Arab merchant vessels — were more than sufficient to justify the expense of more ships, more men, and more voyages. On the shore, the Portuguese felt the acute vulnerability of their tiny numbers, having been overwhelmed and massacred by a mob of civilians, but the power of their cannon fire and the superiority of their seamanship gave them a powerful kinetic tool.
Big Serge, “The Rise of Shot and Sail”, Big Serge Thought, 2024-09-13.
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December 20, 2024
Imagine if Chrystia Freeland had done as well as finance minister as she did emasculating the Prime Minister
I was no fan of Chystia Freeland but like Mitch Heimpel, I have to admire how artistically she sliced off the Prime Minister’s balls on her way out of cabinet:
Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking in 2022.
One thing that is obvious from the former finance minister’s now infamous Monday morning letter is that she internalized the lessons of Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott and Bill Morneau. If you do not immediately put out your version of your demotion or dismissal, it will be done through anonymous leaks to the Parliament Hill Toronto Star or CBC bureau. Ottawa will wonder what really happened. There will be murmurs and whispers about whether you were ever much of a “team player.”
[…]
She left no doubt about what happened, how it happened, or how she feels about it.
In doing so, she did something remarkable. She made it impossible for the PMO’s spinners and issues managers to put the prime minister out to address the media after her letter. He couldn’t answer for anything in the letter without having to answer for everything in the letter. Trudeau may be the most impressive communicator the Liberal party has produced since his father. And he was of no use to the PMO to try and counter Freeland’s narrative on Monday. He could only make matters worse. His one public appearance was in front of a big money Liberal fundraising event, with a pool camera. A bit like an Eastern-bloc gymnast performing before the East German judge.
Even when TIME magazine had him in full blackface, he still addressed the press from the plane. But not Monday.
Never in his almost 10 years as prime minister has Justin Trudeau had a day like that. Supposedly, nominally, the Liberal’s party’s best campaign and communications asset was rendered functionally useless to a television audience. To mix sports metaphors, she beat him in the paint. She drove the lane on him, and he could do nothing. And he did nothing. As of this writing, the prime minister has still not addressed either the media or the country, and is, in fact, cancelling previously scheduled interviews.
And then, Freeland went to the caucus meeting. Anything he wanted to say there, he had to say it to a crowd that could get her version by simply looking over to gauge her reaction. She sank a three pointer on him at the end of the day, just to prove she could.
We can debate her record as finance minister later. Lord knows I have my own qualms with it. But this isn’t about that. Everything else on Monday, the $62-billion deficit and the tanking loonie, are about that.
But her resignation was something unexpected. She bested Justin Trudeau in an air war. She didn’t just beat him, she ran him over. She silenced him.
She may have ended him. That much we still don’t know yet. But she ensured she won’t be remembered for either Disney+ or the “vibecession.”
The first line of her political history is now Chrystia’s Version. And we’ll remember it all too well.
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Election Fever – Rise of Hitler 08, August 1930
World War Two
Published 19 December 2024August 1930 brings Germany to a critical juncture as parties prepare for the September elections. Amid street violence, bans on political uniforms, and soaring unemployment, the stakes couldn’t be higher. This episode unpacks the campaign strategies, shifting alliances, and rising tensions shaping the Republic’s future.
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The legacy “mainstream” media is not going to be replaced with a new monolithic competitor
Ted Gioia says the transition is almost complete and what used to be the mainstream is rapidly becoming a fringe to the new, much more chaotic mainstream:
Last week, a cable news pundit struggled to understand the new media landscape. So he sought advice from his teenage son.
He asked the youngster to name the most influential people in the world today.
Can you guess the names he picked?
Here’s what happened:
I’m thinking to myself he’s going to say Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z.
He says Kai Cenat, Adin Ross, Jynxzi, and Sketch. I don’t know who he is talking about.
I said ‘What platforms are you on?’
He said ‘I’m on Twitch, Kick, and Rumble.’
I said ‘That sounds like you need to go to the hospital’.
What are these platforms? I’m telling you guys, the mainstream has become fringe, and the fringe has become mainstream …
There are people out there that are getting 14 million streams. And we are on cable news getting one or two million.
This is the new reality. The future of media has arrived — but people above a certain age won’t even recognize the names.
Check out the list below of the most watched streamers in the US and Canada.
Jynxzi? Zackrawrr? Summit1g?
A few days ago, I’d have told you these are passwords, not people.
Now I know better. I’ve watched videos from each of these individuals—and it’s shocking how different they are from mainstream media fare.
Media empires are getting defeated, but not by their corporate competitors. They’re finding themselves replaced by a ragtag assortment of podcasters, pranksters, pundits, gamers, gadflies, and influencers.
Who would have believed these headlines just a few months ago?
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The Murder of Egypt’s Forgotten Queen – Shajar al-Durr & Om Ali
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Aug 13, 2024The national dessert of Egypt: bread pudding made from crisp flatbread, pistachios, almonds, sultanas, spices, and rose water
City/Region: Egypt | Baghdad
Time Period: 10th-13th CenturiesOm Ali is the national dessert of Egypt, and its roots go back at least to the 10th century, when we get the base recipe for my version. I took inspiration from other medieval recipes and added the nuts, sultanas, and spices, though they would also use ingredients like camphor, chicken, poppyseeds, and musk.
I really like the flavors, and the dish is sweet without being too sweet, but the bread gives it a kind of noodle-like texture which is a bit odd. Modern versions often use dry croissants, so I won’t judge if you use them or something like phyllo or puff pastry in place of the homemade roqaq.
Take semolina or white bread and soak it in milk until saturated. Then, take half a pound of sugar, or as much as is needed for the amount of bread, crush it, and mix it with the bread. Then, take a clean and shallow pot … add the soaked bread, milk, and sugar … Return the pot to slow burning coals. When the filling is cooked and set, remove the pot from the fire, turn it out onto a wide bowl and serve, God willing.
— Kitab al-Tabikh by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, 10th Century
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QotD: A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s
A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s. (and you seriously do not want to meet the people C’s hire)
that’s it. that’s all we need to extrapolate and plot it.
this pattern emerges in response to two simple drives affecting all those who lack ability to compete […]
the essence of this is simple: the highly competent (A’s) wish to be surrounded by other highly competent people. an organization of mostly A’s (or at least A’s in management) thrives and gets lots done. it innovates. it rewards achievement and ability. it’s a meritocracy. because that’s what A’s want.
and B’s hate this. they cannot get ahead and they live in fear of A’s beneath them coming for their jobs and hatred of A’s above them who prevent advancement and who make demands for performance.
they do not want their jobs taken, so they respond to this by hiring only those less competent than themselves to work under them (C’s). this is how they hold position and avoid challenge and threat.
ideally, they’d also like to clear any A’s above them out of the way so they can generate some upward mobility. they cannot do this on a meritocratic axis, so they seek another one to supplant it.
they seek to move hiring and promotion to some other quality than ability then reinforce it with doctrine.
the pretext itself is incidental to this process. it does not really matter what it is.
it just has to be “something other than competence” and you land in this self-referential recursive trap.
el gato malo, “the mediocrity downspiral”, bad cattitude, 2024-09-10.
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December 19, 2024
“A decree went out from Caesar Augustus” – The evidence for the date of the birth of Jesus
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 18 Dec 2024It’s December, with Christmas fast approaching, and I suspect that a fair few people who never think much about the Romans will hear mention of Caesar Augustus because of this verse from Luke’s Gospel. I have an appendix about this in my biography of Augustus, so thought that I would talk about how the New Testament dates the Christmas story and how well this fits with our other sources for the Ancient World.
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Paul Wells – “I found myself telling La Presse, ‘”What the f—k?” has replaced “Hello” as the standard greeting in Ottawa since Monday'”
Paul Wells shares some thoughts on the unsettled waters of normally placid (if not catatonic) Ottawa in the wake of Chrystia Freeland’s dramatic resignation on Monday:
Image from Blazing Cat Fur
I want to write 5,000 words of narrative in the wake of Chrystia Freeland’s resignation, but we’re still in the middle of the story. Thoughts kind of pour out. I found myself telling La Presse, “‘What the f—k?’ has replaced ‘Hello’ as the standard greeting in Ottawa since Monday.” We’ll see whether they use that quote.
Here are some thoughts, from different angles. I don’t know whether Freeland’s resignation will blow over, the way Justin Trudeau’s last 20 messes did, because I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think Justin Trudeau hopes it’ll blow over. Because he always hopes it’ll blow over. I hear, as you do, rumours that the PM will resign.
[…]
I resist biography as an analytical tool. People outgrow their backgrounds all the time.
But just about everybody who follows politics has been wondering how Trudeau could fire his most loyal lieutenant by a Zoom call three days before he needed her to deliver a crucial fall economic statement. If the Globe‘s latest story is true, and he told her Mark Carney would take the job without knowing whether Carney will take the job, that’s even wilder. Who does that?
The short answer is, somebody who is used to getting his way. Then you look at Trudeau’s life and you think, why wouldn’t he expect to get his way?
The rich kid always knows the normies will cover for him. If he needs a ride, some kid with stars in his eyes will wave his keys and volunteer. If he’s hung over he can borrow the lecture notes. He shows up in racist makeup to yet another party — forcing every other person in the venue to decide how to respond — and once again nobody stands up to him or makes a fuss. Indeed, when the record of that behaviour threatens his political career decades later, there’ll be plenty of volunteers to criticize anyone who mentions the record, rather than criticizing the guy who acted like that.
He runs for the leadership of a national political party on a platform of “I’ll tell you what I stand for after I win”. He mentions carbon pricing precisely one time at his first national leaders’ debate. He dumps his electoral-reform promise at the first hurdle, and later, when asked about it, he blames the person who asks. He gaslights Canada’s first Indigenous attorney-general for months, but he is not particularly kinder to her replacement, who is ejected from Cabinet because, I don’t know, it’s Wednesday or whatever. He lets a 72-year-old man run for re-election and only after it’s over does he let the guy know he’s getting dumped from Cabinet.
He fires the Clerk of the Privy Council by news release while travelling.
In particular, if there’s anyone in the world he might have expected to tolerate the kind of high-handedness we’re hearing about Friday’s Zoom call, it’s Chrystia Freeland. Her eagerness to endorse him in the immediate aftermath of his latest cockup has been such a reliable feature of Canadian public life it’s devolved into a kind of shtick. SNC-Lavalin, 2019: “she has absolute confidence“. Blackface, six months later: “tremendous confidence“. WE Charity, 10 months after that: “The prime minister has my complete confidence“.
Perhaps only Jagmeet Singh has shown more confidence than Freeland, over the years, in Trudeau’s leadership. Given that record — and his own much longer record of taking advantage of others’ generosity — it’s not too much of a stretch to think that at some point he decided his deputy prime minister was just another easy mark.
Turns out that’s the kind of mistake he only needed to make once.
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