Battle Order
Published 12 Nov 2020
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September 17, 2022
Maple Fury: Canada’s Mechanized Infantry Explained
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QotD: Parenting
Parenting is learning how to balance the desire to cheer your kids for raging against The Machine with accepting the fact that you are now, in fact, said Machine.
“It’s amazing that you’re strong enough to escape the crib I confine you to. Your burgeoning independence is a marvel to behold. Keep fighting the dying of the light at bedtime, darling.”
“I hate you!”
“Of course you do, precious. Hatred of the people who are keeping you alive is a necessary part of individuation. However, you lack the executive function to properly weigh the consequences of going to that all-night kegger in the field.”Jen Gerson (@jengerson), Twitter, 2022-06-14.
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September 16, 2022
How “misgendering” shattered the Green Party of Canada
Canada’s Green Party has never been noted for their tight party cohesion, so my use of the word “shattered” in the headline is a bit over-the-top, I must confess. Jonathan Kay provides a quick outline of the party’s history through the leadership of Elizabeth May, Annamie Paul, and most recently, interim leader Amita Kuttner:
Many grumbled that May was too slow to give up her leadership perch. Yet when she finally did step aside in 2019, the party learned that she’d been the only thing holding the outfit together. By the time the 2021 federal election rolled around, the Greens’ leader was a black Jewish woman named Annamie Paul, who got absolutely trounced in her own riding, winning fewer than 4,000 votes. Paul was then quickly run out of the party leadership during a complicated (and often farcical) internecine battle that involved public accusations of bigotry hurled in all directions, and which (predictably) repelled many of the party’s financial supporters.
On Sept. 27 I began the process of stepping down as Green Party of Canada Leader. Today I sent formal notice of my resignation to the GPC. I will also be ending my membership in the GPC.
It was an honour to work for the people of Canada and I look forward to serving in new ways.— Annamie Paul (@AnnamiePaul) November 10, 2021
One might think things couldn’t get any worse for the Greens. But, thanks to the installation of a 30-year-old interim leader named Amita Kuttner, they very much did.
Kuttner self-describes as non-binary, transgender, and pansexual. When asked, “What are your preferred pronouns?” in a 2019 interview, the one-time astrophysicist replied, “they/them”, but then elaborated as follows:
When I write my pronouns, I sometimes write all of them: they/them, she/her, he/him, because I don’t care. There will be days where I’m not always even aware of what my gender is, and I will notice it based on how someone addresses me and whether I respond. I was in choir for many years, and they’d say, “women sing now”, “men sing now”. And I would find myself starting with one or the other group, even though I was obviously supposed to sing soprano. I’d be like, “Oh, I guess I’m feeling that today.”
And yet, despite the fact Kuttner apparently can’t always figure out “what my gender is”, and claims not to “care” in any case, the interim leader felt the need to issue a lengthy statement on September 6th detailing the allegedly devastating emotional effects that ensued when the pronoun descriptor “she/elle” appeared in the electronic caption that sat alongside Kuttner’s name during a Green Party of Canada Zoom call, instead of the Kuttner-approved “they/he/ille”. Indeed, Kuttner described the ordeal as evidence that the Greens were infected by a “system of oppression”:
What happened here impacted me much more than a slip of the tongue. It made me feel hurt and isolated at a moment that should have been filled with inspiration and anticipation … This incident is reflective of a larger pattern of behaviours that a few in the party are perpetuating. Over the years, the party has documented reports which indicate a systemic issue disproportionately affecting Black, Indigenous, and racialized people and 2SLGBTQIA+ people, and I hope many more stories will be able to be shared so that this incident can be a catalyst for change … When things like this happen, people need to see those in leadership positions take some accountability, acknowledge how they have added to this system of oppression and what they must do to break the cycle.
Kuttner’s attempt to weaponize this (apparently very oppressive) instance of miscaptioning forms part of an ongoing civil war that’s been playing out for weeks within the Green leadership. That battle goes to the question of whether the party should proceed with its ongoing party leadership race, or pause it so that Green functionaries can investigate all of the (vaguely expressed) accusations of antisemitism, racism, and transphobia that were flung in every direction during the tumultuous last days of the Annamie Paul era back in 2021.
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The Byzantine Empire: Part 3 – The Age of Justinian – Cashing in the Gains of the Fifth Century
seangabb
Published 7 Dec 2022Between 330 AD and 1453, Constantinople (modern Istanbul) was the capital of the Roman Empire, otherwise known as the Later Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Mediaeval Roman Empire, or the Byzantine Empire. For most of this time, it was the largest and richest city in Christendom. The territories of which it was the central capital enjoyed better protections of life, liberty and property, and a higher standard of living, than any other Christian territory, and usually compared favourably with the neighbouring and rival Islamic empires.
The purpose of this course is to give an overview of Byzantine history, from the refoundation of the City by Constantine the Great to its final capture by the Turks.
Here is a series of lectures given by Sean Gabb in late 2021, in which he discusses and tries to explain the history of Byzantium. For reasons of politeness and data protection, all student contributions have been removed.
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The rise of the “golden penis”
Look folks, there are some headlines that just write themselves, but it’s not my coining — here’s Janice Fiamengo to explain where that … memorable term … came from:
We’ve been told for years that the future is female, that everyone benefits from female leadership and everything improves when women take charge.
Any man on a college campus who has ever objected to the plethora of special university programs and women-only scholarships and pro-woman propaganda was told he had a problem with gender equality.
But now it turns out that some women themselves are not entirely happy with the deal feminists engineered for them, which sees them outnumbering men at close to 3-2 at most English-speaking universities, and thousands of words have already been devoted to the idea that college women deserve a more satisfactory dating experience.
According to Monica Greep in an article from last fall for the Daily Mail, “How Golden Penis Syndrome is ruining dating for university women”, the “deficit of male students” at college “means men develop inflated egos and become Casanovas who cheat — despite a lack of social and sexual skills”.
The formulation reminds me of an old Woody Allen joke from his movie Annie Hall. In my updated version, two women are discussing college dating: “The guys are awful, egotistical schmucks who think they’re really great,” says one. “I know,” says the other, “And there are so few of them!”
If these men are so lacking in “social and sexual skills”, as the article tut tuts, then why are the women upset that there are not more of them? If the women don’t want guys who are Casanovas, they don’t have to date them. But admitting that women have any role in creating the hookup culture being decried is impossible for most commentators today; the fault must always be found in the men. There is even a “relationship therapist” quoted in the article who tells us that Golden Penis Syndrome “speaks of the delusional belief that you are unusually and uniquely gifted as a man”.
Really? Did any of these analysts interview any young men who actually said that about themselves, or is this a case of women projecting onto men their own self-delusions, angry because the men have failed to respond to them as they, the women, would prefer?
As has become typical of pronouncements about men and women, the article blames men for being in the minority at college: at some institutions, they make up only 25% of the student body (see Mark Perry’s charts, for example here, showing the decades-long gender asymmetries; and see his proof that women outnumber men in STEM fields too). The shortage apparently causes men “to see themselves as a prize to be won by female suitors”.
What articles such as this one won’t admit is that these guys are “prizes to be won”, and increasingly so in light of the reported imbalance.
It is well known that college-educated men who marry are, on average, likely to work the longest hours, seek promotion most aggressively, and become high earners focused on supporting their wives and families (even post-divorce, as too often happens). A woman who is fortunate enough to marry a man like this stands to secure a materially better life, often at her husband’s expense of health and leisure, than she would have had if she had depended solely on her own earning power and work ethic (women are famously more interested in “work-life balance” than men are). Now with these men in the minority, women are having to compete for the men’s attention, and we’re supposed to feel sorry for them.
Of course the alleged problem has an obvious solution: the women could date and marry non-university-educated men. Why won’t they? The article mentions this somewhat embarrassing reality in gender-neutral terms by noting that “At the same time [that] university sex ratios have been skewing female, there’s been a simultaneous increase in what academics call ‘assortative mating’.” The article explains, “That’s a fancy way of saying that college grads only want to date and marry other grads.”
Wrong.
It’s not male college grads who won’t marry anyone other than a female college grad. As a 2019 study confirmed, it is almost exclusively women who insist on the need for their mates to earn more. In a sane age genuinely committed to “gender equality”, we might criticize women for their stereotypical behavior, for perceiving men as “success objects”. But we never criticize women for acting out of self-interest.
Only men are criticized for that, as well as for uncouth dating behaviors that everyone knows women also engage in when circumstances favor them: playing the field, cheating, “ghosting”, and so on. Being picky, demanding, and often downright rude are all recognized as a woman’s prerogative because women ARE seen as inherently valuable.
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Look at Life — East of Suez (1966)
PauliosVids
Published 20 Nov 2018More than 50,000 British soldiers, sailors and airmen police the rivers and jungles of Borneo.
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QotD: Counting coup
Among Great Plains Native Americans, the sign of great courage was the individual act (on this, see A.R. McGinnis, Counting Coup and Cutting Horses (2010), which is replete with examples), particularly touching an enemy combatant (“counting coup“) or stealing enemy horses from their camp, typically by night and by stealth. It is sometimes asserted that counting coup means touching an enemy without killing them, but McGinnis fairly handily debunks this – not only could the enemy be killed, he could be already dead, killed by someone else and in some cases up to four warriors might count coup on the same fallen foe, none of whom need be the person who did the killing (McGinnis, 44, 63). These acts were fundamentally individual and the honor that resulted from them was entirely from the daring, rather than, necessarily, their direct efficacy. As McGinnis notes at multiple points, it was not the killing of an enemy, but the actual act of rushing forward to touch the body that was rewarded with honor.
Of course in many cases, counting coup in this way was followed by swift retreat, since the body in question was likely to be amongst the still living and dangerous enemy, which was the point since the purpose of the act was to show supreme daring and skill to rush forward among the enemy and get back out after touching one. The same of course was true of “cutting horses”, a task which could generally only be done by sneaking into an enemy camp, literally surrounded by (hopefully unaware) enemy warriors, before grabbing their horses and riding off (there is a first person account of such a raid in Black Elk Speaks (1932) which has always stuck with me, but McGinnis provides several other examples).
(I should note that the last Great Plains Native American to achieve the complete set of military honors and be made a war chief was Joe Medicine Crow who quite famously managed to lead a war party, take an enemy’s weapon, count coup (on a live opponent!) and steal some fifty horses from the Nazi SS during the Second World War)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
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September 15, 2022
The promise of grand “green” plans versus the reality when the plans are implemented
Elizabeth Nickson on the contrast between how things like the “Green New Deal” are represented by their proponents and the media and what their actual real-world outcomes are like:
“Forest fire” by Ervins Strauhmanis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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Ever wonder what happens to a region once it is “preserved”? Right now, all through the US and Canada, governments are taking giant bites of land, and locking them down under the guidance of the UN’s Agenda 2030, which means a full 30% of the land and waters will be “saved”. If anyone notices, the local media preens and praises itself. Aren’t we all so wonderful and enlightened and caring, the PR says, and the newspapers copy it line-for-line.
No, it’s terrible. It is possibly the very worst thing ever. Set-aside land degrades. There aren’t enough bureaucrats in the world to take care of it. Besides out in the forest or up on the ranges is decidedly not where a civil servant wants to be. As a result none of them know what they have done. It’s a loop, politicians, stupid women and beta males, civil servants engaged in a masturbatory celebration of their goodness and triumph over commerce. From hipster neighborhoods all over North America a song of self-praise rises like smoke into the air.
Except now, right now, I sit in a smoke haze courtesy of the set aside forests in Washington State which are burning. Look, this is simple to think through. In the early 90’s Clinton ratified the spotted owl preservation plan and hundreds of millions of acres of forest were left to themselves, no cutting, no grazing, no firewood collection, no thinning, no fire breaks, no removal of dead trees, especially not beetle-killed trees. In fact, no touch.
What happens when a formerly industrial forest is left to itself? A thousand tiny trees start to grow right up against each other. They grow like carrots that haven’t been thinned. They grow so thick they can’t get light. They draw all the water from the ground, they end up like tinder. Around them brush grows — it too cannot get light or much water so it too is desiccated. It grows up the trees, trying to get at the water in the trees, and acts as a fire ladder
Boom.
Massive canopy fires, which, since they decommissioned the roads into the forest, are very very difficult to either brake or put out.
On every single environmental metric, in every single system, these people destroy the land. What they do is exactly the opposite of what they claim. They take massive amounts of tax money to “save” land and then they destroy the resource. And the towns in the resource area. And the families, and the tax base.
I could go through every environmental goal, and tear it apart. None of them use science that is provable. It can’t be duplicated, its assumptions are wrong, its statistics fiddled. Tens of thousands of papers are used to create these policies, written by the environment movement through its NGOs, funded by rich morons from old families, most of whose ancestors created environmental devastation themselves. I can refute the math and assumptions of EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM given a maximum of four hours and one phone call. No one challenges these studies, and these abominations then become law. Law that destroys the water and land.
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Italy Switches Sides in World War Two – WAH 077 – September 11, 1943
World War Two
Published 14 Sep 2022When Italy leaves WW2, The Nazi German Reich immediately begins occupying the country, and the occupied nations it has held until now.
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“Presentism is … a disease, a contagion here in America as infectious as the Wuhan flu”
Jeff Minick on the mental attitude that animates so many progressives:
My online dictionary defines presentism as “uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts”. To my surprise, the 40-year-old dictionary on my shelf also contains this eyesore of a word and definition.
To be present, of course, is a generally considered a virtue. It can mean everything from giving ourselves to the job at hand — no one wants a surgeon dreaming of his upcoming vacation to St. Croix while he’s cracking open your chest — to consoling a grieving friend.
But presentism is altogether different. It’s a disease, a contagion here in America as infectious as the Wuhan flu. The latter spreads by way of a virus, the former through ignorance and puffed-up pride.
Presentism is what inspires the afflicted to tear down the statues of such Americans as Washington, Jefferson, and Robert E. Lee for owning slaves without ever once asking why this was so or seeking to discover what these men thought of slavery. Presentism is why the “Little House Books” and some of the early stories by Dr. Seuss are attacked or banned entirely.
Presentism is the reason so many young people can name the Kardashians but can’t tell you the importance of Abraham Lincoln or why we fought in World War II.
Presentism accounts in large measure for our Mount Everest of debt and inflation. Those overseeing our nation’s finances have refused to listen to warnings from the past, even the recent past, about the clear dangers of a government creating trillions of dollars out of the air.
Presentism has led America into overseas adventures that have invariably come to a bad end. Afghanistan, for example, has long been known as the graveyard of empires, a cemetery which includes the tombstones of British and Russian ambitions. By our refusal to heed the lessons of that history and our botched withdrawal from Kabul, we dug our own grave alongside them.
H/T to Kim du Toit for the link.
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Lahti L-35: Finland’s First Domestic Service Automatic Pistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Apr 2018When Finland decided to replace the Luger as its service handgun, they turned to Finland’s most famous arms designer, Aimo Lahti. After a few iterations, Lahti devised a short recoil semiautomatic pistol with a vertically traveling locking block, not too different from a Bergmann 1910 or Type 94 Nambu. It was adopted in 1935, but production did not really begin in earnest until 1939 at the VKT rifle factory. Several variations were made as elements of the gun were simplified to speed up production, and the design was also licensed to the Swedish Husqvarna company, which manufactured nearly 10 times as many of the pistols as VKT eventually did.
In today’s video we will look at each of the variations, including one with an original shoulder stock and the early and late military guns as well as the post-war commercial guns marked Valmet instead of VKT.
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QotD: Protectionism
At the other end of the spectrum, government officials have no discretion in doling out the privilege of tariffs because all industries are equally protected, to the same degree, by tariffs from import competition. Here, everyone robs everyone.
Pick any point along this spectrum, and you’ll find – in practice – some people robbing others but not themselves being robbed; other people robbing others while they themselves also are robbed; and yet other people who do no robbing but who are robbed.
What you’ll not find anywhere along this spectrum is a point at which no robbery occurs, for protectionism is in essence a scheme of organized theft.
Protectionists, as has often been observed, have the ethics of thugs. Regardless of their legerdemain or their excuses – or even their felt intent – they are all apologists for plunderers.
Don Boudreaux, “Bonus Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2019-03-17.
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September 14, 2022
Whisky – Scotland’s Water of Life
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 13 Sep 2022
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“Americans, particularly the kind of Very Serious people who make up our intelligentsia, are desperate for a good war”
Freddie deBoer thinks he’s sussed out the reason so many Americans are so very, very pro-Ukraine in the ongoing fighting between the Russian invaders and the Ukrainian defenders (beyond the normal desire to “root for the underdog”):
Approximate front-line positions just before the Ukrainian counter-attack east of Kharkiv in early September 2022.
It was not until I was an adult that I realized that the absurd fervor for Desert Storm was in fact about Vietnam. Fifteen years earlier, American helicopters had fled in humiliation from Saigon, and nothing had happened to take the sour taste out of the mouth of Americans since. There was plenty of power projection in that decade and a half, but no great good wars for the United States to win in grand and glorious fashion, unless you worked really hard to talk yourself into Grenada. America had been badly stung by losing a war to a vastly poorer and less technologically-advanced force. Americans had been nursing their wounds all those years. So when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the “international community” rose to expel him, the country was ready. We were ready for another righteous combat of the Goodies vs. the Baddies. We were ready for the good guys to be the winners again.
This dynamic, I’m certain, is the source of American bloodlust over Ukraine.
We have now spent twenty years without good, noble wars against the Baddies ourselves. Afghanistan was a war effort undertaken in rage and terror, and was accordingly never intelligently conceptualized at the most basic level. The war aim of finding and capturing bin Laden and destroying Al Qaeda gave way to a war on the Taliban that ensured an endless occupation. The Potemkin government we installed was never popular with the people of the country, entailed comical levels of corruption, and showed no ability to train a loyal and effective Afghan army. After 20 years our country tired of spending hundreds of billions on that failure, we left, the government collapsed almost without resistance, and the Taliban are in power again. In Iraq, the basic arguments for the war (WMDs and a Hussein-al Qaeda connection) were swiftly revealed to be bullshit. Saddam’s army fell quickly and he was dispatched after a show trial, but a persistent insurgency inflicted thousands of American casualties. The chaos enabled the rise of ISIS and its various horrors. The new Iraqi government we’ve installed is impossibly corrupt and scores a 31/100 on Freedom House’s ratings of a country’s dedication to political rights and civil liberties. That’s what the United States has gotten for $8 trillion spent on warmaking since 9/11.
America loves a winner, and will not tolerate a loser. So I once heard. Americans, particularly the kind of Very Serious people who make up our intelligentsia, are desperate for a good war. A just war. A war where we win. They’re sick of wars that feel morally complicated, sick of wars that they have to feel queasy about, sick of wars that aren’t just Goodies and Baddies. They are very, very hungry for good war. I think Ukraine is the Desert Storm a lot of people have been waiting for: a war with (they insist) perfectly simplistic moral stakes, an impossibly noble (they assume) set of Goodies, a marauding and senseless (they demand) set of Baddies. All they’re waiting on is victory. And it’s for this reason, this view of war as one big cope, that the pro-Ukraine position is the single most rigidly enforced consensus in our country since 9/11. There is no other issue on which the majority has more vociferously demanded total consensus or more viciously attacked any who dissent or even ask questions. Because America needs a win. People need to believe in a Goodies and Baddies world again.
There are, of course, all manner of hard questions that we could ask, even if we were supportive of Ukraine in this war. That this is a conflict that has constantly inspired left-leaning people to literally say “well, yes, there’s Nazis, but …” might be seen as a matter of some concern. Perhaps, we might just say, isn’t that a little disturbing? But not in this discursive environment. Or we might consider that a total loss for Russia could be one of the most dangerous outcomes for the world even if you support Ukraine. What do you think happens, with a wounded and isolated Russia? Let’s say people get what they want and Putin is deposed. What do you think happens next? We finally get that shining city on a hill in Moscow that we were promised with the collapse of the Soviet Union? That we’ll get the world leader we expected Bagdhad to be in 2003, that a foreign country with foreign people and foreign concerns will suddenly become a docile member of the liberal-capitalist order? Maybe the best post-Putin outcome would be for a similar corrupt autocrat to take his place; at least then there might be stability. A far more likely and more frightening outcome is that leadership is splintered, you have in effect a set of rival warlords squabbling over the spoils, and the world’s largest nuclear arsenal is exposed in a terrifying way. Seems like something to worry about.
But, no. To a degree that genuinely shocks me, hard questions have been forbidden. Complications have been denied. Comparisons to previous conflicts have been forsaken. And this from Democrat and Republican, liberal and leftist, neocon and Never Trumper. It’s constant, everpresent, and relentless, the denial of any complication in the case of Ukraine and Russia. The glee and the gloating and the urge to ridicule anyone who takes even a single step outside of the consensus is remarkable, unlike anything I’ve ever really encountered before. And I find that I can’t even get people to have a conversation about that, a meta-conversation about why the debate on Ukraine is not a debate, about why there are many people who will consider any political position except one that troubles the moral question of Russia’s invasion, about why so many people who learned to speak with care and equivocation during Iraq now insist that there is no complication at hand with this issue at all. I can’t even get a conversation about the conversation going. People get too mad.
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Marmite Dynamite Limited Edition — Tasting (Also Re-Tasting The Others, With A Spoon)
Atomic Shrimp
Published 20 Mar 2021More Marmite – I couldn’t get hold of a jar of this for the group tasting last week, but here it is now!
Here’s the previous video: https://youtu.be/MjrBTcnnK6c
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