Because rice is such a different crop than wheat or barley, there are a lot of differences in the way that rice cultivation shapes the countryside. […] The thing to note about rice is that it is both much more productive on a per-acre basis than wheat or barley, but also much more labor intensive; it also relies on different forms of capital to be productive. Whole-grain wheat and brown rice have similar calorie and nutritional value (brown rice is somewhat better in most categories) on a unit-weight basis (so, per pound or ton), but the yield difference is fairly large: rice is typically around (very roughly) 50% more productive per acre than wheat. Moreover, rice plants have a more favorable ratio of seeds-to-plants, meaning that the demand to put away seeds for the next harvest is easier – whereas crop-to-seed ratios on pre-modern wheat range from 3:1 to 10:1, rice can achieve figures as high as 100:1. As a result, not only is the gross yield higher (that is, more tons of seed per field) but a lower percentage of that seed has to be saved for the next planting.
At the same time, the irrigation demands for effective production of wet-rice requires a lot of labor to build and maintain. Fields need to be flooded and drained; in some cases (particularly pre-modern terrace farming) this may involve moving the water manually, in buckets, from lower fields to higher ones. Irrigation canals connecting paddies can make this job somewhat easier, as can bucket-lifts, but that still demands moving quite a lot of water. In any irrigation system, the bunds need to be maintained and the water level carefully controlled, with also involves potentially quite a lot of labor.
The consequence of all of this is that while the rice farming household seems to be roughly the same size as the wheat-farming household (that is, an extended family unit of variable size, but typically around 8 or so members), the farm is much smaller, with common household farm sizes, even in the modern period, clustering around 1 hectare (2.47 acres) in comparison to the standard household wheat farms clustered around 4-6 acres (which, you may note with the yield figures above, lands us right back at around the same subsistence standard).
Moreover, rice cultivation is less soil dependent (but more water dependent) because wet-rice farming both encourages nitrogen fixation in the soil (maintaining the fertility of it generally without expensive manure use) and because rice farming leads naturally to a process known as pozdolisation, slowly converting the underlying soil over a few years to a set of characteristics which are more favorable for more rice cultivation. So whereas with wheat cultivation, where you often have clumps of marginal land (soil that is too wet, too dry, too rocky, too acidic, too uneven, too heavily forested, and so on), rice cultivation tends to be able to make use of almost any land where there is sufficient water (although terracing may be needed to level out the land). The reliance on the rice itself to “terraform” its own fields does mean that new rice fields tended to under-produce for the first few years.
The result of this, so far as I can tell, is that in well-watered areas, like much of South China, the human landscape that is created by pre-modern rice cultivation is both more dense and more uniform in its density; large zones of very dense rice cultivation rather than pockets of villages separated by sparsely inhabited forests or pasture. Indeed, pasture in particular seems in most cases almost entirely pushed out by rice cultivation. That has very significant implications for warfare and I have to admit that in reading about rice farming for this post, I had one of those “oh!” moments of sudden understanding – in this case, how armies in pre-modern China could be so large and achieve such massive local concentrations. But as we’ve discussed, the size of an army is mainly constrained by logistics and the key factor here is the ability to forage food locally, which is in turn a product of local population density. If you effectively double (or more!) the population density, the maximum size of a local army also dramatically increases (and at the same time, a society which is even more concentrated around rivers is also likelier to allow for riverine logistics, which further improves the logistical situation for mass armies).
But it also goes to the difficulty many Chinese states experienced in maintaining large and effective cavalry arms without becoming reliant on Steppe peoples for horses. Unlike Europe or the Near East, where there are spots of good horse country here and there, often less suited to intensive wheat cultivation, most horse-pasturage in the rice-farming zone could have – and was – turned over to far more productive rice cultivation. Indeed, rice cultivation seems to have been so productive and suitable to a sufficient range of lands that it could push out a lot of other kinds of land-use, somewhat flattening the “ideal city” model that assumed wheat and barley cultivation.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Addendum: Rice!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-04.
September 4, 2023
QotD: Historical rice farming versus wheat or barley farming
September 3, 2023
Online dating apps
The modern dating scene is evidently catastrophic for the majority of men:
After all, dating apps digitally castrate 85 percent of men.
On Bumble, sixty percent of women say they’re looking for a six-foot-tall or taller man. Just 30 percent will drop their requirements one inch lower. Just 15 percent of women would consider a man just one inch shorter than the average 5’9 man. Shorter than that? Your chances fall with each descending inch. Understandably, 80 percent of men lie about their height. Why? Dating apps are merciless, Latin American economies. Most women on dating apps like Tinder and Bumble seek the top 20 percent of men, leaving the rest to compete for a small portion of the dating pool. Reader, I’m not bearing a tall grudge from a short height, I’m six-foot-two.
When I was younger, we used to meet people in person. This antiquated exercise was meritocracy in action.
For the genetically ungifted, that is, the ordinary 80 percent of men, this was the great leveller.
No matter how short or aesthetically unblessed, meeting in person gave all a fair hearing. As the great Christopher Hitchens once wrote, there’s a good reason why men employ humour and why women tend to value a man’s mastery of humour.
Dating apps are anti-merit. Essentially, they provoke a biological feudalism that determines your prospects before you escape the womb.
The 5’9 guy with good humour, high intelligence, seasoned wit, and good manners? Nope.
Social media mutates the ideal into the ordinary. Every man is six-foot-plus. Every woman resembles a Reality TV star: big lips, ballooning bum, bouncing boobs.
In this strange, digital landscape, some porn-addled men use dick pics as a greeting. Three-quarters of women have endured such “greetings”.
Dating apps are a primitive world in which some men say “hello” by showing you their rather ugly organs.
Offline, leery weirdoes masturbating vigorously (Is there any other way?) on the night Tube often end up in jail or in the newspaper. Endearingly, the Daily Telegraph still calls this “performing a sexual act” as if on a stage before a ticket-waving audience and a shrivel of critics.
Reader, I’m no reactionary prude — I’m spiritually French — the only people on earth a majority of whom think adultery is an invigorating hobby rather than a grave sin.
The business of life works better without a screen and an algorithm.
Unsurprisingly, presenting oneself as a product on the “dating marketplace” degrades self-esteem, afflicts mental health, and corrodes our sense of reality. I’m no philosopher, but maybe our burgeoning mental health crisis has something to do with our living as if products on a shelf to be thumbed over by complete strangers.
As Rob Henderson reported last year, the world of dating apps is a hellscape for everyone but the tiny minority of men who get a “swipe right” from vast numbers of women:
Some findings on dating apps:
- 18 to 25 percent of Tinder users are in a committed relationship.
- Women aged 23 to 27 are twice as likely to swipe right (“liked”) on a man with a master’s degree compared with a bachelor’s degree.
- Men swipe right (“liked”) on 62 percent of the women’s profiles they see; women swipe right (“liked”) on only 4.5 percent of the men’s profiles they see.
- Half of men who use dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app. All women who used dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app.
- 30 percent of men who use Tinder are married.
- In terms of attractiveness, the bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.
The War is Five Years Old – WW2 – Week 262 – September 2, 1944
World War Two
Published 2 Sep 2023Five years of war and no real end in sight, though the Allies sure seem to have the upper hand at the moment. Romania is coming under the Soviet thumb and Red Army troops are at Bulgaria’s borders, the Allies enter Belgium and also take ports in the south of France. A Slovak National Uprising begins against the Germans, and the Warsaw Uprising against them continues, but in China it is plans for defense being made against the advancing Japanese.
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“This is the world of the Spring and Autumn Annals, and the Zuozhuan“
Another anonymous book review at Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten considers the Zuozhuan, a commentary and elaboration of the more bare-bones historical record of the Spring and Autumn Annals:
The first page of the Li Yuanyang edition of Zuo zhuan (16th century).
Wikimedia Commons.
To tell the story of the fall of a realm, it’s best to start with its rise.
More than three thousand years ago, the Shang dynasty ruled the Chinese heartland. They raised a sprawling capital out of the yellow plains, and cast magnificent ritual vessels from bronze. One of the criteria of civilization is writing, and they had the first Chinese writing, incising questions on turtle shells and ox scapulae, applying a heated rod, and reading the response of the spirits in the pattern of cracks. “This year will Shang receive good harvest?” “Is the sick stomach due to ancestral harm?” “Offer three hundred Qiang prisoners to [the deceased] Father Ding?” The kings of Shang maintained a hegemony over their neighbors through military prowess, and sacrificed war captives from their campaigns totaling in the tens of thousands for the favor of their ancestors.
But the Shang faced growing threat from the Zhou, a once-subordinate people from west beyond the mountains. Inspired by a rare conjunction of the planets in 1059 BC, the Zhou declared that there was such a thing as the Mandate of Heaven, a divine right to rule—and while the Shang had once held it, their misrule and immorality had forced the Mandate to pass to the Zhou. Thirteen years later, the Zhou and their allies defeated the Shang in battle, seized their capital, drove their king to suicide, and supplanted them as overlords of the Central Plains.
If the Shang were goth jocks, the Zhou were prep nerds. In grave goods, food-serving vessels replaced wine vessels. Mass human sacrifice disappeared, while bureaucracy expanded. The Shang lacked the state power to administer their surrounding subject peoples so much as intimidate them into line; the Zhou, galvanized by a rebellion not long after the conquest, put serious thought into consolidating their control. While the king remained in the west to rule over the original Zhou lands, he sent relatives and allies east into the conquered territories to establish colonies at strategically important locations, anchoring Zhou rule in a sprawling network of hereditary regional lords bound together by blood, marriage, custom, and ancestor worship of the Heaven-blessed founding Zhou kings.
For generations, the system worked, ensuring military successes at the borders and stability in the interior. The first reigns of the dynasty became a golden age in the cultural imagination for thousands of years. But by the dynasty’s second century, barbarian incursions were putting the state on the defensive, and surviving records hint at waning control over the regional lords and power struggles at court. 771 BC marked a breaking point, when barbarians allied with disgruntled nobles to overrun the royal domain and kill King You of Zhou.
Legend has it that the king was bewitched by his new consort, a melancholy beauty born from a virgin impregnated by the touch of a black salamander. Desperate to make her laugh, the king pranked his lords by lighting the beacon fires intended to summon them in case of invasion. When she delighted at the sight, he kept playing the same trick until the lords got sick of him and stopped coming, which doomed him when the barbarians actually invaded.
But the historical reality seems to be the usual sordid political struggle around a new consort — and heir — threatening the power of the old one. The original queen’s powerful father allied with barbarians to root out the upstart, only to get maybe more than he bargained for. Sure, he put his grandkid on the throne in the end, but the royal house had been devastated. It would never regain the ancestral lands it had lost to the barbarians, the direct holdings that filled its treasury and provided for its armies. The king retreated east into the Central Plains, playing ground of lords that were now more powerful than him. While the royal line remained symbolically important, as holder of the Mandate of Heaven from which all the states derived their legitimacy, the loss of central authority in every other sense would unleash centuries of intensifying interstate warfare and upheaval.
This is the world of the Spring and Autumn Annals, and the Zuozhuan.
The Spring
“Spring and Autumn Annals” is a bit of a redundant translation, since “spring and autumn” was just an old way of saying “year”, and thus, “annals”. And technically, there were multiple Spring and Autumn Annals — every state kept, in addition to court and administrative documents, its own laconic record of each year’s wars, diplomacy, natural phenomena, major rites, and notable deaths. But the state of Lu’s is special, because Confucius was from Lu. He’s said to have personally edited and compiled the extant version of its 242-year-long Spring and Autumn, loading each character with weighty yet subtle moral deliberation. This ensured it a place in the Confucian canon, and its survival where every other state’s annals have been lost to time. The era that it covers is named the Spring and Autumn period after the text, not the other way around.
Taken on its own, though, the Annals is little more than a list of dry facts. For example, the first year reads:
The first year, spring, the royal first month.
In the third month, our lord and Zhu Yifu swore a covenant at Mie.
In summer, in the fifth month, the Liege of Zheng overcame Duan at Yan.
In autumn, in the seventh month, the Heaven-appointed king sent his steward Xuan to us to present the funeral equipment for Lord Hui and Zhong Zi.
In the ninth month, we swore a covenant with a Song leader at Su.
In winter, in the twelfth month, the Zhai Liege came.
Gongzi Yishi died.
Who is Zhu Yifu? Who’s Duan? What’s all this about “overcoming”? Where does the moral deliberation come in? This canon badly needs meta, and the most notable of the ancient commentaries written for the Spring and Autumn Annals is the Zuozhuan. Ten times as long as the text it’s for, the Zuozhuan is the flesh on the Annals‘ bare bones, one of the foundational works of ancient Chinese literature and history-writing in its own right.
While tradition attributes the text’s authorship to Zuo Qiuming, a contemporary of Confucius, most modern historians date its compilation to the century after. In its extant form, it’s presented interleaved with the Annals, so that after the Annals’ account of each year, with entries such as …
In summer, in the sixth month, on the yiyou day (26), Gongzi Guisheng of Zheng assassinated his ruler, Yi.
… you have the Zuozhuan’s account of the year, mostly composed of elaborations upon the above entries, such as:
The leaders of Chu presented a large turtle to Lord Ling of Zheng. Gongzi Song and Gongzi Guisheng were about to have an audience with the lord. Gongzi Song’s index finger moved involuntarily. He showed it to Gongzi Guisheng and said, “On other days when my finger did this, I always without fail got to taste something extraordinary.” As they entered, the cook was about to take the turtle apart. They looked at each other and smiled. The lord asked why, and Gongzi Guisheng told him. When the lord had the high officers partake of the turtle, he called Gongzi Song forward but did not give him any. Furious, Gongzi Song dipped his finger into the cauldron, tasted the turtle, and left. The lord was so enraged that he wanted to kill Gongzi Song. Gongzi Song plotted with Gongzi Guisheng to act first. Gongzi Guisheng said, “Even with an aging domestic animal, one is reluctant to kill it. How much more so then with the ruler?” Gongzi Song turned things around and slandered Gongzi Guisheng. Gongzi Guisheng became fearful and complied with him. In the summer, they assassinated Lord Ling.
The text says, “Gongzi Guisheng of Zheng assassinated his ruler, Yi”: this is because he fell short in weighing the odds. The noble man said, “To be benevolent without martial valor is to achieve nothing.” In all cases when a ruler is assassinated, naming the ruler [with his personal name rather than his title] means that he violated the way of rulership; naming the subject means that the blame lies with him.
There’s a few too many mythological creatures and just-so stories for the Zuozhuan to be taken entirely at face value, but it’s clear that its creator(s) had access to diverse now-lost records for the era portrayed. For example, some of the events show a two-month dating discrepancy — one of the states used a different calendar, and most likely the creator(s) overlooked the difference when borrowing from sources from that state. While the overall level of historical rigor versus 4th century BC authorial invention remains under heated debate, the Zuozhuan is undeniably the most comprehensive written source on its era that we have.
And importantly, it’s enjoyable.
You can think of the Zuozhuan as the Gene Wolfe of ancient historical works. It’s not an easy read, especially in translation, where names that are visibly distinct in the original (e.g. 季, 急, 姬, etc.) all get unhelpfully collapsed into one transliteration (Ji). The work drops you into a whirl of nouns and events, some of them one-off asides, others part of long-running narrative threads that might only surface again decades of entries later. While a casual readthrough still offers plenty of rewards, putting together all the subtext, references, and connections between entries is an endeavor that’s occupied readers for millennia. Your unreliable narrator remains enigmatic on most of the events he presents, leaving interpretation as an exercise for the reader; when he does speak, either directly or in the voice of the “noble man”, he can raise more questions than he answers. For one, the rule about the naming of an assassinated ruler largely holds in the Annals, but seems to have some notable exceptions.
But if you’re willing to plunge in, the work offers an experience unlike anything else.
The Saalburg: A Roman Fort on the German Frontier
Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 23 May 2023A brief tour of the principal buildings in the Saalburg, Germany’s most completely reconstructed Roman fort.
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QotD: The obesity epidemic – a possible explanation
When I was growing up as a white supremacist, embedded in a neighborhood of white privilege, before all our communities were broken by forced immigration and vulture capitalism, we all, despite our relative wealth, ate the dullest food you can imagine. Simple, basic, and not a lot of it: fish sticks, hamburgers, a hunk of roast beef or lamb once in a while, canned vegetables, ice cream once a week, no pop, like ever. Mac and cheese. Spaghetti and meatballs. Roast chicken. That’s it. No Japanese, Chinese, French, Italian, fusion, Korean, Mexican. Out for dinner once a month. Maybe. Abstemious.
Add to this, the entire culture was Stoic. Suck it up buttercup was pretty much the solution to everything. Life was not fair. Your duty was to make it more fair. That’s was it. That is the entire ethic of white supremacy. You didn’t eat a lot because that was not good for a) you or b) your tribe on whom your survival was based. It meant you were cheating, taking more of scarce common resources. That was not OK. This wasn’t stated or even conscious, but it was hard-wired.
My ever so privileged tribe left the Levant around 30,000 years ago, hived off to the Mongol Steppes, then migrated north to Scandinavia, thence to northern Scotland, and then to Ireland. Pretty much starved all the way. For 30,000 years. Constant famines. Dying by the side of the trail, absorbed into the peat moss. Etc. Like that. Around 500 BC they moved to the Midlands and bred out those who were lactose intolerant. To this day I can live on milk and cheese and meat. Wild greens. Salt. Bread. Their diet.
Then, after 1500 years of breeding and starving in the Midlands, a strike of lightning: the Industrial Revolution leading inevitably to industrial food and abundance. For 300 years afterwards there wasn’t famine for us, but there was pioneering and starving to the point of having to eat squirrel and tree bark, wars and rationing. Then, for the first time, EVER, the massive cohort of boomers got into the job market, started to make money, fall in love, date and party, food got spectacular.
And everyone got fat. Genes taught to horde any excess bloomed into layers and layers of fat around every torso and butt. This is not a moral issue. This is genetic. For every “race” or ethnic grouping.
That’s it. The end. Period. Every one of us has this history embedded in our genetic structure, one way or another. It is a bitch. It means a constant war against your appetite and genetic history which is shrieking EAT EAT! It’s only the left that makes it into a crime. We are hardwired to see fat as dangerous to collective survival, and deep down, we know it’s just not healthy. Near everyone is fat and everyone worries about it.
My white privileged clan developed stoicism as the primary survival tool because it worked. For 30,000 years, it made it possible to survive anything. Today, white culture or rather, the dominant culture filled with people of every race and color still uses stoicism to succeed in every profession or activity. There is no escaping it. Indulge the weakest part of you and you are doomed to failure.
It’s only the left that has made emotional blackmail the determinant survival tool.
Elizabeth Nickson, “The Woke Marxist Agenda to Destabilize Kids’ Health”, Welcome to Absurdistan, 2023-06-01.
September 2, 2023
Trial Run for D-Day – Allied Invasion of Sicily 1943
Real Time History
Published 1 Sept 2023After defeating the Axis in North Africa, the stage was set for the first Allied landing in Europe. The target was Sicily and in summer 1943 Allied generals Patton and Montgomery set their sights on the island off the Italian peninsula.
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The 4% non-solution
Michael Geist updates us on the Canadian government’s latest blunder in the Online News Act saga:
The government is releasing its draft regulations for Bill C-18 today and the chances that both Google and Meta will stop linking to news in Canada just increased significantly. In fact, with the government setting an astonishing floor of 4% of revenues for linking to news, the global implications could run into the billions for Google alone. No country in the world has come close to setting this standard and the question the Internet companies will face is whether they are comfortable with the global liability that would see many other countries making similar demands. The implications are therefore pretty clear: there is little likelihood that Meta will restore news links in Canada and Google is more likely to follow the same path as the Canadian government establishes what amounts to 4% link tax from Bill C-18 on top of a 3% digital services tax and millions in Bill C-11 payments.
The estimated revenues from Bill C-18 or the Online News Act have always been the subject of some debate. The Parliamentary Budget Officer set the number at $329 million, using a metric of 30% of news costs for all news outlets in Canada. Under that approach, over 75% of the revenues would go to broadcasters such as Bell, Rogers, and the CBC. The Canadian Heritage estimates were considerably lower, with officials telling a House of Commons committee last December that they expected about $150 million in revenue:
I won’t speak to the PBO report which is the source of the numbers that you cited. That was not a department-led initiative. The internal modelling that we did when we tabled the bill and mentioned in our technical briefings was more around $150 million impact. That was based again in terms of how this played out in Australia and making some assumptions about how it might play out here. With respect to the PBO report, any questions about that particular number would have to be directed towards them.
By the time the bill reached the Senate several months after that, the number had grown to $215 million.
With the release of the draft regulations, the government has established a formula with an even bigger estimate. The creation of a formula is presumably designed to provide some cost certainty to the companies and represents a change in approach in Bill C-18, given that the government had previously said it would not get involved private sector deals but it is now setting a minimum value of the agreements. Officials told the media this morning that it believes Google’s contribution would be $172 million and Meta’s would be $62 million, for a total of $234 million. However, that may understate the revenues by focusing on search revenues alone. If based on total revenues, with a 4% minimum floor, the requirement would exceed C$300 million for Google. Either way, the number is more than 50% higher than the $150 million estimate the department gave the Heritage committee just eight months ago.
The draft regulations will also provide some additional clarity on several issues. The standard for a digital news intermediary has been fleshed out to include $1 billion in global revenues and 20 million Canadian users. As for the process, those companies subject to the rules are required to conduct a 60 day open call for negotiations. To meet a fairness standard, the resulting deals must be within 20% of the average and cover a wide range of news outlets. Contributions can include non-monetary items but it seems unlikely the resulting deals would grant links significant value. The CRTC would then pass judgment on the deals and determine whether the companies are exempt from a final offer arbitration process. The timing on this includes a 30 day consultation process on the regulations, before they are finalized prior to the December deadline. But with the CRTC not having established a bargaining framework before 2025, the liability issues start arising well before any deals are concluded or approved.
QotD: Ancient DNA
The wonderful thing about ancient DNA is it gives us an extreme case of this. Basically, the first serious attempt at creating a scientific field of archaeology was done by 19th century Germans, and they looked around and dug some stuff up and concluded that the prehistoric world looked like the world of Conan the Barbarian: lots of “population replacement”, which is a euphemism for genocide and/or systematic slavery and mass rape. This 19th century German theory then became popular with some 20th century Germans who … uh … made the whole thing fall out of fashion by trying to put it into practice.
After those 20th century Germans were squashed, any ideas they were even tangentially associated with them became very unfashionable, and so there was a scientific revolution in archaeology! I’m sure this was just crazy timing, and actually everybody rationally sat down and reexamined the evidence and came to the conclusion that the disgraced theory was wrong (lol, lmao). Whatever the case, the new view was that the prehistoric world was incredibly peaceful, and everybody was peacefully trading with one another, and this thing where sometimes in a geological stratum one kind of house totally disappears and is replaced by a different kind of house is just that everybody decided at once that the other kind of house was cooler. The high-water mark of this revisionist paradigm even had people saying that the Vikings were mostly peaceful traders who sailed around respecting the non-aggression principle.
And then people started sequencing ancient DNA and … it turns out the bad old 19th century Germans were correct about pretty much everything. The genetic record is one of whole peoples frequently disappearing or, even more commonly, all of the men disappearing and other men carrying off the dead men’s female relatives. There are some exceptions to this, but by and large the old theory wins.
I used to have a Bulgarian coworker, and I asked him one day how things were going in Bulgaria. He replied in that morose Slavic way with a long, sad disquisition about how the Bulgarian race was in its twilight, their land was being colonized by others, their sons and daughters flying off to strange lands and mixing their blood with that of alien peoples. I felt awkward at this point, and stammered something about that being very sad, at which point he came alive and declared: “it is not sad, it is not special, it is the Way Of The World”. He then launched into a lecture about how the Bulgarians weren’t even native to their land, but had been bribed into moving there by the Byzantines who used them as a blunt instrument to exterminate some other unruly tribes that were causing them trouble. “History is all the same,” he concluded, “we invaded and took their land, and now others invade us and take our land, it is the Way Of The World.”
Even a cursory study of history shows that my Bulgarian friend was correct about the Way Of The World. There’s a kind of guilty white liberal who believes that European colonization and enslavement of others is some unique historical horror, a view that has now graduated into official state ideology in America. But that belief is just a weird sort of inverted narcissism. I guess pretending white people are uniquely bad at least makes them feel special, but white people are not special. Mass migration, colonization, population replacement, genocide, and slavery are the Way Of The World, and ancient DNA teaches us that it’s been the Way Of The World far longer than writing or agriculture have existed. It wasn’t civilization that corrupted us, there are no noble savages, “history is all the same”, an infinite history of blood.
Land acknowledgments always struck me as especially funny and stupid: like you really think those people were the first ones there? What about acknowledging the people that they stole it from? Sure enough one of the coolest parts of Reich’s book is his recounting the discovery that there were probably unrelated peoples in the Americas before the ancestors of the American Indians arrived here, and that a tiny remnant of them might even remain deep in Amazonia. So: what does it actually mean to be “indigenous”? Is anybody anywhere actually “indigenous”?
Jane Psmith and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-29.
September 1, 2023
How the term “the Deep State” morphed from left-wing to (extreme, scary, ultra-MAGA) right-wing jargon
Matt Taibbi wants to track the changes in political language in US usage, starting today with “Deep State”:
In July of last year David Rothkopf wrote a piece for the Daily Beast called, “You’re going to miss the Deep State when it’s gone: Trump’s terrifying plan to purge tens of thousands of career government workers and replace them with loyal stooges must be stopped in its tracks.” In the obligatory MSNBC segment hyping the article, poor Willie Geist, fast becoming the Zelig of cable’s historical lowlight reel, read off the money passage:
During his presidency, [Donald] Trump was regularly frustrated that government employees — appointees, as well as career officials in the civil service, the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service — were an impediment to the autocratic impulses about which he often openly fantasized.
This passage portraying harmless “government employees” as the last patriotic impediment to Trumpian autocracy represented the complete turnaround of a term that less than ten years before meant, to the Beast‘s own target audience, the polar opposite. This of course needed to be lied about as well, and the Beast columnist stuck this landing, too, when Geist led Rothkopf through the eye-rolling proposition that there was “something fishy, or dark, or something going on behind the scenes” with the “deep state”.
Rothkopf replied that “career government officials” got a bad rap because “about ten years ago, Alex Jones and the InfoWars crowd started zeroing in on the deep state, as yet another of the conspiracy theories …”
The real provenance of deep state has in ten short years been fully excised from mainstream conversation, in the best and most thorough whitewash job since the Soviets wiped the photo record clean of Yezhov and Trotsky. It’s an awesome achievement.
Through the turn of the 21st century virtually no American political writers used deep state. In the mid-2000s, as laws like the PATRIOT Act passed and the Bush/Cheney government funded huge new agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the word was suddenly everywhere, inevitably deployed as left-of-center critique of the Bush-Cheney legacy.
How different was the world ten years ago? The New York Times featured a breezy Sunday opinion piece asking the late NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake — a man described as an inspiration for Edward Snowden who today would almost certainly be denounced as a traitor — what he was reading then. Drake answered he was reading Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry by Marc Ambinder, whose revelations about possible spying on “eighteen locations in the Washington D.C. area, including near the White House, Congress, and several foreign embassies”, inspired the ACLU to urge congress to begin encrypting communications.
On the eve of a series of brutal revelations about intelligence abuses, including the Snowden mess, left-leaning American commentators all over embraced “deep state” as a term perfectly descriptive of the threat they perceived from the hyper-concentrated, unelected power observed with horror in the Bush years. None other than liberal icon Bill Moyers convinced Mike Lofgren — a onetime Republican operative who flipped on his formers and became heavily critical of the GOP during this period — to compose a report called “The Deep State Hiding in Plain Sight“.
Will the Resistance Smash Nazism or Build Communism? – War Against Humanity 112
World War Two
Published 31 Aug 2023The hour of resistance is here. Across Western Europe, armies of resistance fighters rise up to meet the Allied armies and sabotage the Axis war machine. In Slovakia, a secret army fights to restore Czechoslovak independence. But against this hopeful backdrop, the Axis forces strike back hard. And, all around, the spectre of communism strikes fear in the Western Powers.
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Grassroots protests continue against London’s expanded ULEZ
London mayor Sadiq Khan’s “Ultra Low Emission Zone” expansion is not sitting well with the people who see it as an undemocratic imposition on the poorest Londoners:
Nigel Farage at the ULEZ protests in London, 30 August 2023.
Image from JoNova.
This week many Londoners are waking up to the impact of living in an Ultra Low Emission Zone as the £12.50 daily charge for unfashionable cars begins in the outer poorer suburbs.
Normally “climate change” costs are secretly buried in bills, hidden in rising costs and blamed on “old unreliable coal plants”, inflation or foreign wars. Your electricity bill does not have a category for “subsidies for your neighbors’ solar panels”. But the immense pain of NetZero can’t be disguised.
For a pensioner on £186 a week it could be as much as an £87 a week penalty for driving their car — or £4,500 a year. The Daily Mail is full of stories of livid and dismayed people who served in the Navy or worked fifty years, who can’t afford to look after older frail Aunts or shop in their usual stores now, or who will have to give up their cars. People are talking about the “end of Democracy”. The cameras are expected to bring in £2.5 million a day in ULEZ charges to City Hall. But shops inside the zone may also lose customers, and everyone, with and without cars will have to pay more for tradespeople and deliveries to cover the cost of their new car or Ulez fee.
Protests have reached a new level of anger and hooded vigilantes in masks carry long gardening clippers, or spray cans and lasers to disable cameras that record number plates for Ulez. In one photo the whole metal camera pole has been sheared by an electric saw of some sort. There chaos.
Interactive maps have sprung up to report where the cameras are, and help people “plan their trips”. The vigilante group called Blade Runners have vowed to remove or disable every ULEZ camera in London. Nearly nine out of ten cameras have been vandalized in South-east London.
The Transport for London website was overwhelmed with searches from people wondering if their car was compliant and they would have to pay just to drive on the roads their taxes and fees built. Some people have bought old historic cars to get around the fee, but apparently a lot of people hadn’t thought much about what was coming. Sadiq Khan probably didn’t mention this in his election campaign. Presumably there are others in London who will get a nasty surprise bill in the mail.
As Nigel Farage says: “I’ve never seen people so angry about this new tax on working people. “And people are not just furious at Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, they’re angry at the Prime Minister and the Conservatives for not stopping the scheme.
Nylon 66: Remington’s Revolutionary Plastic Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 May 2023In the 1950s, Remington decided that it needed an inexpensive new .22 self-loading rifle to add to its catalog. In looking at how to reduce the cost of such a rifle, they hit upon the idea of using polymer to replace the wooden furniture typically used — and to replace the metal receiver as well. Remington was owned by DuPont at the time, and DuPont had developed an excellent strong polymer which they called “Nylon” — specifically, Nylon composition number 66.
Remington engineers developed a massively complex and expensive mold to inexpensively stamp out monolithic polymer .22 rifles in the mid 1950s. They knew this design would cause concern to a large part of their market because of its non-traditional construction, and so they put the new rifles through hundreds of thousands of rounds of grueling testing. It passed these trials with flying colors, and was released in January 1959 to pretty rave reviews. By the time it was finally taken out of production in 1987, more than 1,050,000 of them had been produced — a fantastic success on a pretty big gamble.
Thanks to Dutch Hillenburg for loan of this example to show you!
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QotD: Process thinking about the Russo-Ukraine war
Combining them, consider the Ukraine Narrative as one giant ad campaign. The lack of Outcome-thinking hit all of us from the very moment it became The Current Thing. What, exactly, are we doing in Ukraine?
Note that there is a case to be made. I don’t agree with it, obviously, but I can make one, and of course it’s ruthlessly Outcome-driven: In a world where States have no friends, only interests, it is consistent with Realpolitik to weaken your rivals when it can be done at low cost and minimal risk. We’re doing to Russia what Russia (and China) did to us in Vietnam — they were quite open about aiding their fraternal socialist brothers in the struggle against Capitalism and Western Imperialism.
One can — and of course in this case would — argue that fucking around in Ukraine is neither low-cost nor low-risk, but that too is Outcome-thinking. You can persuade me, an Outcome thinker, with facts and reason. Steve Sailer is almost a caricature of an Outcome thinker at this point, and he’d be just super at demolishing my hypothetical Realpolitik argument for US aid to Ukraine.
But not only do the Process-“thinkers” in [Washington, DC] not have an Outcome in mind, it never crossed their minds to have one in the first place. This is why I keep coming back to Jaynes [Wiki]. We — normal people — keep trying to assign goals to people like Victoria Nuland. The only goals we can come up with, though, are bugfuck insane — she seems to really believe that not only can Ukraine win the current conflict, but that they’ll march all the way to Moscow, Regime-Change everyone, and invite all the Western parasites in to carve up the country …
… nothing else makes sense, but “sense” left the building with Elvis. There is no Outcome. Which is likelier:
- that she has some top secret Master Plan in a manila folder in a safe somewhere, that reads “Ukraine captures Moscow; Exxon CEO is on the first flight in”; or
- Her behavior seems purposive the way the eerily coordinated gyrations of a school of fish or a flock of birds seems purposive? It looks coordinated, but it can’t actually BE coordinated — it happens too fast for all the individual members to process the signals.
I’ve done a lot of Ukraine shit in the stoyak roundups, and I have never once seen a Victory scenario. The closest even the wildest-eyed optimist comes is very clearly Underpants Gnome shit:
- Send Wunderwaffen to Zelensky
- ???
- Victory!!!
And the third term — the crucial one, Victory — is never ever defined. Let’s assume the Wunderwaffen work and the Big Spring Counteroffensive that they’ve almost literally been advertising, Mad Men-style, goes off flawlessly. What then? At what point do we call off the dogs? Again, unless you seriously believe in Victoria Nuland’s Master Plan — a real document in a real safe, that she got Brandon’s puppeteers to forge his signature on — there simply IS no answer. Their “plan” for “victory” on the battlefield is exactly the same as Bud Light’s “plan” for “victory” with the [Dylan Mulvaney] ads.
It’s all Narrative, all Process. The only outcomes anyone involved considers are all small-o, and they’re all interpersonal. Nobody thinks about battlefield victory — the actual movement of lines on a map, let alone the reality of fighting and dying. But they obsess over being seen to believe in victory. To return to Geo. Orwell‘s commentary:
Creatives spend perhaps half their time in protracted meetings where the primary activity is herding cats, making sure everyone agrees on the current direction of things … until the direction changes, a couple of hours later.
And everyone is fine with this, because everything of importance happens interpersonally.
I’m going to reuse this quote, but this time quote it in full. Two paragraphs, and they’re long, but extremely important. Here’s the first:
The art directors and copywriters who dream up what you see in commercials tend to have a few things in common. The copywriters imagine themselves future screenwriters or novelists, the art directors imagine themselves movie directors eventually. For them, every commercial is a little self-contained movie with a plot and characters, even though no one in the real world gives fifty milliseconds of thought to the character of the TV housewife using that new dustbuster. They very seldom discuss sales, in the sense of “Will this sell more widgets?” In fact they mostly loathe “hard sell” advertising, where you emphasize price.
Emphasis mine, because the question “Will this sell more widgets?” is the definition of Outcome thinking. And if you’re trying to herd cats — as anyone who has had to endure this kind of meeting knows — measurable results are the enemy. Because I really want you to consider the answer to the following question: What’s in it for you, personally, if Acme Corp. sells a thousand more widgets?
Unless you’re a salesman on commission, the answer, for all practical purposes, is: Nothing. Maybe a small bump in your end-of-year bonus, if you get a year-end bonus, but that’s the absolute best case scenario: Another hundred bucks on a single paycheck, six months down the line.
And while I’m certainly not going to sneeze at a hundred dollars, consider what that Benjamin cost you. Half the office hates you now, because you were right. You’re smarter than them, you bastard, and now they know it. You showed them up. Oh, and you’ve also alienated the other half of the office, because what should have been a thirty minute meeting stretched for two hours because you stuck to your guns. Thanks, asshole, I got caught in rush hour and didn’t get home until 7:30. I hope you choke on your $100 bonus. (And don’t think you’re going to get any love from the people who agreed with you in the meeting from the get-go, because they’re all jealous they didn’t think of it themselves).
Now consider the second paragraph, that gets to the heart of Process thinking:
They [“creatives”] favor “conceptual” advertising, where instead of telling you why this cellphone is superior to another, they show you an ironic or cute story involving the cellphone, or maybe you merely show exciting, vibrant people dancing with the thing, with bright colors and music video tropes. This goes back to the recent discussion here of cultural conformity and “mood boards”. Mood boards have been a very big thing in advertising, even more so than twenty years ago. “Look and feel” takes precedence over most things, especially in corporate, nationwide campaigns. For example, you will see Lexus nationwide commercials where the car drives heroically through some surreal industrial or desert landscape, with extreme lighting and lots of flashy cinematography. Local dealer ads for Lexus will concentrate on terms and pricing, and art directors hate doing local dealer car ads. Not artsy enough.
“Conceptual” ads are collaborative ads. With Outcomes, you’re either right or wrong; it either sells more widgets or it doesn’t, but everyone contributes to “mood”. No one can be proven right via sales figures, but no one can be proven wrong, either. Jane sucks at Outcome-driven advertising, because none of her ads moved the sales needle. But Jane is great at “mood boards”; Jane’s a real team player; Jane makes everyone in the meeting feel special. When Jane runs the meeting, we achieve consensus in thirty minutes. When you run the meeting, Mr. Will This Sell More Widgets, it goes on for hours, and we never get the answer — IF we get the answer — until the next quarter’s sales figures come in.
Apply that to the Ukraine Narrative, and test it against Nehushtan‘s heuristics:
“We have always been at war with Eurasia”: what you have to support turns on a dime and doesn’t have to be consistent with anything that went before.
Check. What you “believe” changes as the “mood board” changes, and the “mood board” changes as the group consensus changes in the pitch meeting. We’re all susceptible to this to some degree — someone with stronger Google-fu than mine can no doubt find that old psych experiment from the Fifties, with something like Müller-Lyer lines. No doubt you recall hearing about it: They planted some kids in the crowd who insisted that the shorter lines were really longer, and since these kids were absolutely adamant in their “belief”, eventually most of the class “agreed” that the shorter lines were actually longer.
That’s all consensus stuff, Process stuff. What does it really cost me to say that the shorter line is actually the longer? If it’ll get Jane to finally shut the fuck up, ok. If Jane happens to be really popular, and especially if I think agreeing with her will get me closer to her panties, then the faster I’m going to agree. And if Jane happens to hold my entire career in her hands, and can get me kicked out of the Cloud, to wander the Cursed Earth among the Dirt People …
“Two Minutes Hate”: doesn’t matter who or what the target person is, they are always slotted into the same role, given the same attributes, and the same criticisms are made of them.
Severian, “What is Leftism? (and what to call it?)”, Founding Questions, 2023-05-30.
