World War Two
Published 2 Oct 2022As the Allies advance in southern Italy, the people of Naples join them in fighting the Wehrmacht. In Denmark, the biggest rescue operation of Jews thus far begins.
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October 4, 2022
Sweden: The Jews’ Salvation? – WAH 080 – October 2, 1943
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“… apparently the future of science is BAJEDI (Belonging Accessibility Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion), which is quite a bit cooler than mere DEI”
And you thought the stuffy old National Science Foundation was only supporting pale, stale, cisgendered white male research? Think again!
I’ve written many times about the National Science Foundation and its increasingly politicized conception of “science”. As an independent federal agency with a nearly $9 billion budget, the NSF is a behemoth in the world of academic science, shaping research agendas and the future of the professoriate. And apparently the future of science is BAJEDI (Belonging Accessibility Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion), which is quite a bit cooler than mere DEI. Here’s a current funding opportunity for scientists:
The federal agency that funds research projects like “Probing Nucleation and Growth Dynamics of Lithium Dendrites in Solid Electrolytes” is moving hard into the business of social justice, with career-making grants that will focus STEM researchers on the problem of racial grievances. Here’s how much money is available for that racial equity program:
The premise underlying this turn toward equity-focused science projects is that “science scholars who are underrepresented in STEM produce higher rates of scientific novelty”. Innovation is grounded in race and ethnicity; the more gloriously intersectional you are, the more creative you become. Imagine the boldness of a transgendered Asian Pacific Islander astrophysics, and how much newer and fresher our conception of the universe is when it doesn’t come from straight white males.
And so the NSF wants to fund “diversity champions” who will freshen up our science with BIPOC innovation — which means adding more sociologists to the team of geophysicists: “When developing proposals, the PI team should acknowledge the need for increased engagement from social and behavioral science experts to address issues related to BAJEDI in the geosciences and include these best practices and experts in proposed projects.” […]
It’s a real cultural revolution in the world of academic science.
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The History of the Wine Glass
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 31 May 2022
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QotD: “The world bought British and British was best”
So much has been promised in the past, so much has come to nothing, no wonder they are sceptical. And impatient. Already I can hear some of them saying: “The Conservatives have been in five months. Things do not seem to be that much better. What is happening? Do you think the Conservatives can really do it?” We say to them this: Yes, the Conservatives can do it. And we will do it. But it will take time. Time to tackle problems that have been neglected for years; time to change people’s approach to what Governments can do for people, and to what people should do for themselves; time to shake off the self-doubt induced by decades of dependence on the state as master, not as servant. It will take time and it will not be easy.
The world has never offered us an easy living. There is no reason why it should. We have always had to go out and earn our living — the hard way. In the past we did not hesitate. We had great technical skill, quality, reliability. We built well, sold well. We delivered on time. The world bought British and British was best. Not German. Not Japanese. British. It was more than that. We knew that to keep ahead we had to change. People looked to us as the front runner for the future.
Our success was not based on Government hand-outs, on protecting yesterday’s jobs and fighting off tomorrow’s. It was not based on envy or truculence or on endless battles between management and men, or between worker and fellow worker. We did not become the workshop of the world by being the nation with the most strikes.
I remember the words written on an old trade union banner: “United to support, not combined to injure”. That is the way we were. Today we still have great firms and industries. Today we still make much of value, but not enough. Industries that were once head and shoulders above their competitors have stumbled and fallen.
It is said that we were exhausted by the war. Those who were utterly defeated can hardly have been less exhausted. Yet they have done infinitely better in peace. It is said that Britain’s time is up, that we have had our finest hour and the best we can look forward to is a future fit for Mr Benn to live in. I do not accept those alibis. Of course we face great problems, problems that have fed on each other year after year, becoming harder and harder to solve. We all know them. They go to the root of the hopes and fears of ordinary people — high inflation, high unemployment, high taxation, appalling industrial relations, the lowest productivity in the Western world.
People have been led to believe that they had to choose between a capitalist wealth-creating society on the one hand and a caring and compassionate society on the other. But that is not the choice. The industrial countries that out-produce and outsell us are precisely those countries with better social services and better pensions than we have. It is because they have strong wealth-creating industries that they have better benefits than we have. Our people seem to have lost belief in the balance between production and welfare. This is the balance that we have got to find. To persuade our people that it is possible, through their own efforts, not only to halt our national decline, but to reverse it and that requires new thinking, tenacity, and a willingness to look at things in a completely different way. Is the nation ready to face reality? I believe that it is. People are tired of false dawns and facile promises. If this country’s story is to change we the Conservatives must rekindle the spirit which the socialist years have all but exhausted.
Margaret Thatcher, “Speech to Conservative Party Conference”, 1979-10-12.
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October 3, 2022
“Still, what about the boys?”
Janice Fiamengo on the far-from-impartial emphasis of concern on young people being pushed toward radical “solutions” to gender dysphoria:
Last year, conservative educational institution Prager U published “Why Girls Become Boys“, a short video by journalist Abigail Shrier, the author of Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, published in 2020. Shrier’s focus is evident from the titles: girls. Previously, Shrier had been profiled in an interview with Candace Owens when she was still working on the book. Though the interview is now three years old, its canvassing of teen transitioning — in a discussion that moves from concern about girls being “seduced” into trans, to anger at society’s failure to protect girls from boys who transition — provides a fairly accurate representation, I believe, of conservative positioning on this subject. Girls who transition are seen as victims; while boys who transition are seen (if they are seen at all) as predators.
This double emphasis is clear in the interview. Shrier and Owens describe the collusion of media influencers, the public school system, woke punditry, and medical authorities to encourage girls (but not boys, it seems) to consider their gender identity “fluid”. Feelings of discomfort are too readily interpreted as signs of a trans identity. Girls can be made to believe themselves trans very quickly, sometimes simply from viewing one or more internet videos; and schools are not required to tell parents if their daughter begins identifying as male. From age fifteen, girls can find gender clinics willing to prescribe testosterone without their parents’ consent; a girl can have her breasts amputated as early as age sixteen. The lifetime of dependency on hormones (their consequences unknown), the risky surgeries, and the tragic missed opportunities — of motherhood in particular, but even of having breasts — were emphasized by both pundits.
It’s almost impossible to imagine these two women discussing the tragedy of losing a penis, of being denied the opportunity to become a father, of being denied the joy of male sexuality.
From this point, the conversation moved seamlessly into discussing the victimhood of girls forced to share their private spaces — and of course their sporting competitions — with biological males (often called “men” as in “Men are invading girls’ sports”). These males are not discussed as vulnerable innocents duped into taking body-altering hormones or undergoing dangerous surgeries. No imaginative effort was spent on why these boys want to live as trans female. The underlying assumption seemed to be that boys’ transition, far from being an attempt to relieve real distress, is an act of appropriation of female experience. The boys were depicted as aggressors who invade girls’ locker-rooms and deny girls opportunities (or, even worse, masquerade as trans in order to prey on girls sexually). Are there boys made uncomfortable in their change rooms or other private spaces by the presence of biological girls? The question seems never to have occurred to Shrier and Owens.
Shrier and Owens agree in decrying feminism for failing to protect girls and for failing (allegedly) to affirm femininity and girlhood. “Girls aren’t being told how wonderful it is to be a girl!” Their own feminist — or at least female-centered — assumptions are clearly evident in their conviction that the trans phenomenon is about multiple harms to females, harms which must always take precedence over the legitimate needs and experiences of males. And in fact, contrary to what Shrier and Owens seem to believe, there are many feminists who vehemently denounce biological male incursions into female bodies and spaces; many of them, such as Meghan Murphy, Julie Bindel, and Sheila Jeffreys, to name only a few, advocate from an avowedly anti-male perspective.
Shrier might respond that the overwhelming majority of adolescents who believe themselves to be trans are female (as she states in her Prager U video). This may be true (a recent Psychology Today article puts the number at greater than 80% female) but does not mitigate my objection. Teen suicide is about 80% male (more on this later), but it is hard to imagine concerned pundits ignoring the troubles of girls. Many discussions of teen suicide, in fact, make much of the fact that girls attempt suicide more often than boys, downplaying the fact that boys carry out their suicides in such distinctively high numbers. Don’t get me wrong: I have no objection to a focus on girls’ difficulties in adolescence — except when it improperly ignores and even maligns boys.
It wasn’t all that long ago that the vast majority of young people seeking “gender-affirming” therapy were males hoping to become trans-females. In the last few years, that proportion has flipped completely.
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Nazis Go Fascist Hunting – WAH 079 – September 25, 1943
World War Two
Published 2 Oct 2022The Wehrmacht continues Operation Axis and its slaughter of Italian soldiers. In Western Europe, the situation of the Jews becomes increasingly precarious, especially so in Denmark.
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“We’re one breaking news alert from seeing a day’s work dramatically reduced in importance, if not rendered obsolete forever”
It’s a very weird moment in time, as The Line‘s weekly editorial wrap-up notes:
This is perhaps the strangest dispatch we’ve ever written. It is a fact of life in the news business that top headline can change in an instant. We’re one breaking news alert from seeing a day’s work dramatically reduced in importance, if not rendered obsolete forever. Every journalist has known that frustration. And today, as Western officials remain concerned about the risk of nuclear attack, this seems more true than usual. All our little insights into Canadian politics and cultural issues would make a weird second and third item in a dispatch where the lead item was Kyiv going up in a mushroom cloud.
So yes. This is where our minds are. As discussed at some length in our podcast and video this week, your Line editors have been closely watching developments in the war between Ukraine and Russia, and indeed take very seriously threats by the Russians to use nuclear weapons. We understand fully that it is very possible that all of Putin’s talk of nukes is a bluff, intended to rattle the West and encourage Ukraine to accept Russian gains and negotiate.
Neither seems likely — Ukraine is motivated and Western support, though imperfect, remains strong. We also see little indication that Putin could win the war in which he has stranded himself and his country, and we believe that things will only get worse for him. His attempt to mobilize 300,000 has turned into an item of mockery abroad, as pictures of old men and rusted equipment spread across social media. The “annexation” of occupied areas into Russia clearly didn’t deter either Ukraine or its Western backers; Ukraine’s forces remain on the move, with more Western weapons arriving all the time. And meanwhile, on the battlefield, the Ukrainian Armed Forces grow ever stronger: in just the last few hours, they have handed the Russians another embarrassing defeat in the city of Lyman. That city, a local rail junction, was important for Putin’s logistical efforts in the region, and fell into Ukrainian hands with a shocking lack of resistance.
See what we mean? This isn’t going well for Russia, and everything he tries is just stranding Putin deeper in the shit. He could have de-escalated this war at several points. At every juncture he has chosen escalation instead, and that has only made his problems worse — more deaths, more unrest, more humiliation. All of his efforts to intimidate the West or crush the Ukrainians have failed. What can he do? How can he get himself out of this problem? What will happen to him if he can’t?
These are the questions keeping us up at night. Seeing the conflict through his eyes, it’s not hard for us to imagine that Putin will come to view some kind of nuclear use as his only remaining chance to escape this war with his power still in place, or perhaps even simply with his life. After all, all this talk about whether Putin is “rational” depends entirely on how he understands his own circumstances. What may seem insane to us may, in fact, make perfect sense to him, and we suspect one’s definition of reason undergoes a radical re-evaluation when one feels a noose getting ever-tighter around the throat.
So that’s why we think it’s possible. Let’s talk what we think is possible. There are a few different ways he could use nuclear weapons. We are not the experts on this, but your Line editors are, if nothing else, reasonably well read on the topic, and we have spent the last few weeks talking with genuine experts. If we do see the use of a nuclear weapon, Putin could use a single small device on a minor target in Ukraine (or perhaps over the Black Sea) in hopes of shocking NATO and the world through his sheer willingness to break the nuclear taboo. We would expect him to go a bit further, and hit Ukraine with a series of small strikes intended to disrupt its military and seize some kind of conventional military advantage on the ground, on top of the political shock.
Or hey: he could go fully insane and try to terrorize the world into bending to his will by, for instance, attacking NATO directly, or using one of his larger nuclear weapons to utterly destroy a city in Ukraine.
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France in the Cold War: AA52 Replaces the Hotchkiss
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 May 2022
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QotD: The foundation of Rome, as recounted by Vergil and Livy
Aeneas (son of Aphrodite/Venus and a mortal man, Anchises) does appear, by the by, in the Iliad, though he isn’t a particularly notable or impressive hero (naturally Vergil will embroider Aeneas until he is presented as the equal of an Achilles or Odysseus because … well, wouldn’t you?). The Aeneid follows (with the aid of a major flashback) Aeneas as he shepherds his surviving Trojans from Troy to their prophesied new homeland in Italy (with a minor stopover in Carthage) and then covers also the war that breaks out between Aeneas’ Trojans and the local inhabitants (the Latins) when he arrives. Vergil cuts off at the climactic moment of the war (which in turn presents Aeneas as rather morally grey, a feature that is also present, as we’ll see, in Livy’s retelling of Rome’s legends), but Livy provides the denouement. After a period of conflict (Livy presents two different versions of the exact sequence), Aeneas ends up married to Lavinia, the daughter of Latinus, king of the Latins (Livy calls them the Aborigines – lit, “the native inhabitants”, Vergil the Latins; in both cases Latinus is their king) and the Trojan exiles and Latinus’ people form a single community at Lavinium, which in turn founds a colony at Alba Longa, both in Latium (the region of Italy in which Rome is, although note we haven’t founded Rome yet).
We then fast forward a few generations. Rhea Silvia, a priestess of Vesta at Alba Longa gives birth to twins, Romulus and Remus by (Livy expresses some doubt) the god Mars. The twins are exposed (for complicated royal-family-drama reasons we needn’t get into) and rescued by either a she-wolf or a woman of ill-repute (Livy isn’t sure which on account of Latin lupa having both meanings and clearly both legends existed, Liv. 1.4) and raised among shepherds in the hills of northern Latium. More politics ensues, Romulus and Remus, having grown to adulthood, right some wrongs in their home city of Alba Longa and set out to found their own city.
At which point Romulus promptly gets into a fight with and murders Remus over who is going to be in charge (this sort of intense moral ambiguity where the venerated legendary founder figures are also quick to violence and deeply flawed is also a feature of the Aeneid and can be read either as a commentary on Augustus or as some lingering Roman discomfort with their own recent history of civil wars running from 88 to 31 BC; we are not the first people in history to have very mixed feelings about how well people in our country’s past lived up to our ideals). Crucially, Romulus forms his new settlement (prior to the fratricide) out of – as Livy has it – “the excess multitudes of the Albans and Latins, to which were added the shepherds” (Liv. 1.6.3). After this, desiring to increase the population of the city, Romulus sets a place of refuge in the city so that “a crowd of people from neighboring places, altogether without distinction, free and slave, fled there eager for new things” (Liv. 1.8.6) and were incorporated into Romulus’ growing city. Livy approves of this, by the by, declaring it the first step towards rising greatness.
Romulus quickly has another problem because all of these new settlers were men, so he concocts a plot to carry off all of the unmarried women of the neighboring people, the Sabines – an Umbrian people (we’ll come back to this, for now we’ll note they are ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Latins) – who lived in the hills north of Rome under the guise of a religious ceremony (Liv. 1.9-13). At a festival where the Sabines had been lured to under false pretenses, the Romans abduct and forcibly marry the Sabine women, while using hidden weapons to chase away their families (I should note Livy goes to some length to assure the reader that the captured maidens were subsequently persuaded to marry their Roman captors, rather than forced (Liv. 1.9.14-16), though what choice he imagines the unarmed, captive women to have had is left for the reader to wonder at in vain; in any event, we need not share Livy’s judgement or his effort at patriotic euphemism and may simply note that bride-capture is a form of rape). The Sabines naturally go to war over this but (according to Livy) a peace is mediated by the captured women (according to Livy, unwilling to see their new husbands and old fathers kill each other) and the two communities instead merge on equal terms. In the midst of all of this, Livy does have Romulus set down a set of common customs for his people, which he thinks to have been mostly Etruscan (Liv. 1.8.3), the Etruscans being the people inhabiting Etruria (modern Tuscany) the region directly north of Rome (Rome sits, in essence, on the dividing line between Latium to the South and Etruria to the North).
Now we want to note two things here from this high-speed trip through the first few chapters of Livy. First is the deep ambivalence towards Roman violence here. Livy presents Rome as a city founded on fratricide, conquest, rape and sacrilege. Livy occasionally attempts to soften the impact of these legends (particular with the Sabines), but only so far. This isn’t really the place to unpack of all of that but suffice to say that I think that Livy’s willingness to open his history of Rome – practically an official history of Rome – so darkly speaks to a literary project still attempting to come to grips with the stunning civil violence which had gripped Rome for Livy’s entire adult life and had, as he wrote, only recently ended. And one day we also ought to come back and do a deeper look at how women function in Livy’s legends and histories (Livy’s account becomes much more properly historical as he gets closer to his own time); women, mostly Roman women, suffering (often sexual) violence so that in their sacrifice the Roman state might be enhanced is a repeated motif in Livy (e.g. Lucretia, Verginia).
But more directly to our topic today, I want to note at this point exactly the sort of society Livy is imagining the earliest Rome, under its first king Romulus, in particular that it consists of a lot of different peoples and heritages. We’ll come back to exactly who all of these peoples are (historically speaking) in a moment. But Livy and Vergil first create a Trojan-Latin fusion community, which produces both Romulus and Remus and their initial core of settlers (mixed in with other, apparently purely Latin communities), who then gather up shepherds from all around, and then invite literally anyone from nearby communities to join them (which must include Etruscan communities to the north as well as Umbrians and Falisci of various sorts from the hills) and then finally fuses that community with the Sabines (an Umbrian people).
So we have our very first Romans, as the first Senate is being set up (1.8.7) and the very first spolia opima – the prize for when one commander defeats his opposite number in single combat – being won (1.10.7) and the very first temple being founded in the city (1.10.7). And those very first Romans, as Livy imagines them, are not autochthonous (that is, the original inhabitants of the place they live), nor ethnically homogeneous, but rather a Trojan-Aborigines-Latin-Faliscian-Umbrian-Etruscan-Sabine fusion community. For Livy, diversity – ethnic, linguistic, religious – defines Rome, from its very first days.
But of course this is all legends – important for understanding how the Romans viewed themselves, but necessarily less valuable for understanding the actual conditions in Rome at its earliest. Unfortunately, we lack reliable written sources for this part of the world so early (most of the “regal” period, when Rome was ruled by kings, notionally from 753 – the legendary founding date for the city – to 509, is beyond historical reconstruction).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans? Part I: Beginnings and Legends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-11.
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October 2, 2022
Smolensk and Naples Liberated! Both in ruins – WW2 – 214 – October 1, 1943
World War Two
Published 1 Oct 2022Major prizes are taken by the Allies this week on two fronts — Naples in Italy and Smolensk in the USSR, but they are advancing all over the Eastern Front, across the Italian peninsula, and in the South Seas, but the enemy is leaving a trail of destruction as he pulls back.
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Robert Heinlein’s “Crazy Years” have nothing on real headlines in 2022
Ed West on what he calls the “triumph of the blank slate” in western culture:
As a depressive conservative who always sneered at the new atheist movement, I’ve enjoyed a certain, almost masochistic smugness about the way the sharp decline in American religious practice has led to a proliferation of wacky beliefs. I told you so, I laugh, as our boat heads for the rocks and certain doom for all of us. And every month I read something else in the media which makes me think, with the best will in the world and a sincere belief in improving our lot, that country’s ruling class is losing its grip on reality.
To take one recent example, an article in the Atlantic recently made the case that separating sport by sex doesn’t make sense, because it “reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting — a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years”.
The author stated that “though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential”.
Quoting an academic who claim “that sex differences aren’t really clear at all” the author reported of some studies showing that “the gap they did find between girls and boys was likely due to socialization, not biology”.
On a similar theme, a few weeks back the New York Times ran a piece arguing that “maternal instinct is a myth that men created”. In the essay, published in the world’s most influential newspaper, it was stated that “The notion that the selflessness and tenderness babies require is uniquely ingrained in the biology of women, ready to go at the flip of a switch, is a relatively modern — and pernicious — one. It was constructed over decades by men selling an image of what a mother should be, diverting our attention from what she actually is and calling it science.”
Even the most prestigious science magazines increasingly make claims about sex that a decade ago would have seemed wacky. Just recently, Scientific American stated that “Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex — the male — and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the ‘two-sex model’ served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.”
If you find any of these beliefs strange, then you might need to “educate” yourself about “the science” because this is the direction of travel now. This kind of stuff is everywhere, growing in popularity in all areas, but all ultimately having the same common inheritance — the blank slate.
Yet what is strange is that such ideas are triumphant, even as the scientific evidence against them mounts up, with the expanding understanding of genetics and the role of inheritance. The tabula rasa should by all rights be dead, indeed it should have been killed twenty years ago with the publication of one of the most important books of the century so far, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate.
With its subtitle “the modern denial of human nature”, Pinker’s worked looked at the various ideas that had emerged out of academia and into wider society: that rape was not about sex, that hunter-gatherer societies were peaceful, that sex differences were learned, all of these beliefs having the common theme that humans are born with infinitely malleable minds and that that life outcomes are entirely shaped by society.
Pinker felt, quite reasonably, that many of these comforting beliefs were on the way out. Of the idea that differences in intelligence were entirely environmental, he wrote that “even in the 1970s the argument was tortuous, but by the 1980s it was desperate and today it is a historical curiosity”. And yet this historical curiosity continues to flourish, and 20 years after publication, the blank slate is stronger than ever. More so than in 2002, it’s taboo to discuss the genetic components of human intelligence or the biological factors involved in differing male and female behaviour. The ground has shifted – towards the blank slate.
Pinker is an optimistic Whiggish liberal who has since produced books looking at the decline of violence and making the case that things are getting better — that’s taken a wobble this decade, but I think he’ll be proven right, even if I think the new atheist-aligned cognitive psychologist has a slight blind spot about religion. In the Blank Slate he argued that worthy progressive goals should not rest on untrue scientific assumptions about human nature. When those ideas are proven false, the political argument will crumble too — and yet this hasn’t happened. Instead the taboos just grows stronger.
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“We are governed by a transnational criminal enterprise”
Elizabeth Nickson on the deliberately created web of disasters the entire western world faces thanks to our governments’ allegiance to philosophies promulgated by organizations like the WEF:
We are governed by a transnational criminal enterprise.
What are you doing about it?
One sentence caught my attention in Giorgia Meloni’s speeches this week. She said that most insulting thing for her and other Italians, was the EU’s order to erase all references to Christianity, Christmas and Christ from all government documents by Christmas (ironic) of 2022.
This is another of those blows from the One Worlders that feels like someone is stepping on your heart and pressing down. I may not be a church-going Christian, but it defines me like almost nothing else. It is my history, my literature, my culture, my ethical standards, my everything. Christianity defines the western world, it is an activist faith, it orders a congregant to spread goodness wherever he or she goes. Erasing it is a crime similar in effect as the death camps of which our leaders dream. It destroys the ground of our being.
And then I think of my father. Look at this photograph. As a teen, he was very much like the kids of today, self-involved, vain, a girl magnet like his great grandson, Bryson, who never sees a girl who doesn’t interest him. But he was one of the few fully adult men I have known. I want to say only, but I’ve met thousands of men and know few of them as well as I knew him.
It wasn’t until long after my father’s death that I discovered that he was at the tip of the spear of the British Army as they landed at D-Day, pressed forward into France and then into Germany. The Canadian Army, the fourth largest standing army in the world in 1945, had a reputation of brutalism like no other army, famous for it in WW1. This was in part because it was built – as was Canada – by some of the fiercest medieval clans in Europe. Just before James 1 murdered the British border clan heads, Elizabeth I said that with 10,000 such men, James could topple any throne in Europe. Canada attracted those clans, the climate, the terrain was the roughest in the world, and only they could conquer it. And in 1943, they formed an army like none other.
Being his child, I can grope myself into what he was feeling during those two years under remorseless fire, on the ground, buried into caves on the Rhine that last winter, responsible for hundreds of men. He woke up every day for two years, with death certain. I have his Book of Common Prayer. It is swollen with use, especially the prayers for the dead he read over the bodies of his friends. After the war he was put in charge of a Nazi camp and told to “sort those people out”. Kind of like a desert in hell, I would think.
His faith carried him through those years. He was welded to it by the time it was over, although he never proselytized, it was just part of him. Christianity acts, with good men, as spur and comfort. It informed every ethical decision he made. After the war, he came home and worked, fighting unions that destroyed the textile industry in Quebec, trying to keep his factory going in the face of actual bags of burning shit thrown at our house. He retired at 55 with a non-compete clause and spent the rest of his life in charity, working for free. He ran in succession one enterprise after another. His entire life, all of it, he used his spare time to work in the community. Three meetings a week, no matter what. He knew where every sparrow fell in the country village I grew up in, and in the city to which he retired. And if he missed one, his uncles, aunts or cousins picked them up and set them right. It was how they lived.
That used to be a requirement for adulthood. He learned it from his family who came to the New World in 1630, and who all, to a man or woman, worked for free in whatever village or county they found themselves in, making sure everyone was all right. In the towns and cities they settled, across the US and Canada from 1600 to 1945, you were only considered an adult if you rolled up your sleeves and worked for other people in the place that you lived, without being paid, and without expecting praise.
If you didn’t do that work, you were considered a baby that everyone else had to carry. You were made to feel that.
It was that above every single other thing, that made the US and Canada the magnet it is for every other race and country in the world. Self-government by adults. And by the way, for the race-hustlers, they were officers on the Underground Railroad, when it wasn’t popular to be on the side of people of color. They married into Indian bands when it was absolutely beyond the pale.
The boomer generation abandoned that task, and the devolution of the culture was swift. The left creates jobs by creating bureaucrats and the responsibilities that used to be held in common, solved in common, done for goodness alone, are now done for money and benefits by people who generally do not live in the regions they supervise. They have screwed up everything because they can’t make decisions because they have no courage. And they have no courage because they have no ethical standards. Their only standard is whether it increases their own comfort. And that of maybe two other people. To whom they are related.
The only thing they create is debt and obstacles to growth. Aside from technical/engineering standards, (which are being broken) everything they do, can be done by citizens acting in concert.
Our disengagement led to our current economic catastrophe, like nothing else. It is the reason the globalist criminals were able to take over. It is why we now sit in danger of nuclear war.
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What is a Bopper Car?
Lake Superior Railroad Museum & NS Scenic Railroad
Published 5 Jun 2020Railroads came up with lots of great ideas to make things more efficient. Many of those ideas, like bottled water, and the red carpet, are part of our daily lives … as we have shown you in previous episodes.
Today, we talk about an idea that sounded good, but didn’t work out: The Bopper Car. A combination of hopper car and box car. Only a few were made, and the remaining ones were donated to the Lake Superior Railroad Museum. Today they’re used as storage for many of the shop’s parts.
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QotD: US intelligence failures in the Tet Offensive
By summer 1967, MACV (for convenience) had convinced itself that the North Vietnamese no longer had the resources to win the war militarily, and they knew it. This conclusion was based in large part on metrics coming in from field commanders. Specifically, MACV argued that by mid-1967, the Communists had passed what they, MACV, termed the “inflection point” — the North Vietnamese were losing more forces than they could replace, which led to a significant decrease in NVA / VC fighting capacity, plummeting morale, etc.
At no point, it seemed, did they question this assumption, or the bases of this assumption, the key to which was: Kill ratio. We all know how that goes, no need to get into the weeds, but note that everything hinges on the North Vietnamese not only losing the war, but knowing themselves to be losing.
[…]
So, too, with ever-increasing reports that the Viet Cong were going to launch major attacks on South Vietnamese cities. Since US analysts assumed the VC didn’t have the forces for that, these reports were dismissed as propaganda.
Finally, the assumption that the NVA knew themselves to be losing was seemingly confirmed with the siege of the big US firebase at Khe Sanh. It shared a similar geography with Dien Bien Phu, and when some of the same units that had participated in the original battle showed up to take on the Marines, US analysts concluded that the Communists, desperate for a psychological victory, were trying to make another Dien Bien Phu out of Khe Sanh.
At most, US analysts reasoned, Khe Sahn was another Battle of the Bulge — a last-ditch “saving throw”-type attack by an almost-beaten enemy. Much like German forces in the Ardennes, then, the North Vietnamese would attack the Americans, because they were the strongest part of the Allies, and therefore the most immediate military threat.
In fact, almost the exact opposite was true, pretty much all the way down the line. The NVA’s plan was to attack ARVN (the South Vietnamese Army) because they were the weakest, and would be even weaker during Tet, when half of them would be on furlough. But ARVN wasn’t out on the perimeter and along the DMZ. They were in the cities. The whole point of the attack on Khe Sanh (and of a whole series of skirmishes called “the border battles”) was to keep US forces out on the perimeter and away from the cities.
It worked spectacularly, too — even as Tet was unfolding, Gen. Westmoreland assumed it was a diversion, to draw American troops away from Khe Sanh. Half the country had been overrun before Westy began to think maybe Khe Sanh wasn’t the target after all; he only really believed it when the NVA broke off the siege and withdrew.
It was Narrative uber alles.
Severian, “Book Rec: Tet, Intelligence Failure”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.
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October 1, 2022
Johann Hari’s unlikely career resurrection
I have to admit that Johann Hari was pretty much just a British media personality I had a vague awareness of, but I hadn’t paid much attention to him (his Wikipedia sockpuppeting came to my attention in 2011, and I quoted from an article he wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2019). As this post by Ben at Ben’s Comedy News outlines, I’d largely missed the rest of his fall and rise:
Nowadays, Johann Hari is known as a pop psychology expert. He does TED talks and writes books with simplistic messages like:
- your smartphone is ruining your attention span! (Stolen Focus)
- you should cure your depression by throwing away your medication and joining a book club! (Lost Connections)
- the war on drugs is bad! (Chasing the Scream)
His books get positive blurbs from distinguished thinkers, such as the comedian and twink admirer Stephen Fry, the listicle entrepreneur Arianna Huffington, the feminist and sex offender’s wife Hillary Clinton, the comedian and fake revolutionary Russell Brand, and the TV doctor Doctor Rangan Chatterjee.
But when you look at how actual experts assess his work, it’s not so positive. The neuroscientist Dean Burnett responded to an extract of Lost Connections in his Guardian column, under the title Is everything Johann Hari knows about depression wrong? Burnett points out that:
despite Hari’s prose suggesting he’s uncovered numerous revelations, pretty much everything he “reveals” is well known already
Hari, in pursuit of an anti-anti-depressant narrative, makes the claim that you can be diagnosed with depression and put on medication immediately after a traumatic event like losing a child, which Burnett (who teaches psychiatry) describes as:
at best a staggering exaggeration, at worst an active fabrication to support a narrative.
But this article isn’t about what Johann Hari has been doing recently. It’s about what Hari was up to before he reinvented himself as some kind of expert, back when he was a journalist who ended up being disgraced.
It’s about how Hari has somehow rounded allegations of serious fabrication down to a record of minor plagiarism. It’s about how in trying to attack his critics, he seems to have inadvertently revealed his penchant for little brother incest fantasies with a troubling racial dimension. It’s about how I tried to fix the record on Wikipedia, and ran into trouble as Wikipedia’s policies collided with the sorry state of British journalism.
Back in 2010, Johann Hari was a star newspaper columnist (if you’re a millennial that means he wrote hot takes that got lots of clicks; if you’re Gen Z, think of him as a viral TikTok star but with words on paper).
In 2011 he was disgraced and kicked out of the profession.
Now if you look at the articles that were written about his comeback, like this New Statesman piece or this Guardian piece you’d conclude that he was disgraced for two things:
plagiarism – specifically, taking quotes from text someone had written in a book or article, and pretending that the person had said it directly to him
abuse of Wikipedia – in particular, using a fake identity to edit the pages of professional rivals with false allegations
I followed the whole Hari affair pretty closely at the time (I didn’t like him because he had been a cheerleader for the Iraq War, so I enjoyed watching his career go down in flames).
When his latest book came out a month ago, I looked at his Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia saves the history of all the different versions of each page, so here is a link to what I saw when I did that.
And here’s part of the summary and the table of contents:
The whole article struck me as weird because it didn’t mention two things I clearly remembered:
- Hari got in trouble, not just for minor plagiarism, but for allegedly making things up completely.
- Even more memorably, the fake identity he used to edit Wikipedia, “David Rose”, was also used to author an incest kink porn story with a hilarious title.
You can see why Hari (and whatever reputation management consultants he has working for him) would want to focus on the “plagiarism” angle. It’s not good to pass off a quote you got from someone’s book as something they told you directly, but it’s not as serious as completely inventing something. I suppose technically it’s plagiarism because you’re pretending you elicited the quote in an interview and you’re not citing the original book; but it’s a lot better than the typical case of plagiarism that involves passing off someone else’s work as your own. Hari’s defence is that he was “cutting corners” because he was under so much pressure due to his meteoric success at young age, etc. etc.
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