A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, 1946.
March 30, 2022
QotD: Orwell on political writing
March 29, 2022
A leading source of incompetence
My contacts on social media have probably gotten tired of me pointing out that any big organization will perform less well than a smaller one in the same activity, and governments across the western world have been growing bigger and less competent every year. Sarah Hoyt recalls the time she saw an almost Soviet display of big government incompetence on a visit to her native Portugal:
The last time I was in Portugal I got to witness (actually the time before last, while running through the Lisbon airport) something I’d only previously read about as being normal in the Soviet Union: structures that were being built and decaying, simultaneously, which seems impossible, but I assure you it’s not.
[…]
The question is: competence has existed, and had high marks. We know it existed at various times, because their works survive: the landscape of Europe is still littered with Roman bridges and aqueducts, not to mention Roman roads. Cathedrals and monuments abound. Our own country has marvels of engineering and construction still standing and you don’t have to fix daily.
So, where did that competence go? And why does no one seem to know how to do anything. (Here as an aside, almost everything I learned to do competently had to be learned on my own, and often against massive resistance.)
Well, for about a hundred years now, we’ve been under the ideological ascent of socialism. And socialism — international socialism, to be precise — is only good for creating picturesque ruins. (The romantics would have loved them.)
Note that I’m not defending national socialism. As I’ve pointed out before, when the government takes over the economic life of a country, and directs what the companies can or cannot do, the tendency is to quash innovation, and as a rule everyone becomes very poor.
It’s just that it depends. Like empires (which to an extent they are) national socialist regimes can do okay under an extraordinary ruler. I had a mini-dispute with Herb in the comments on whether Franco was or was not Fascist. He absolutely was, both in the economic, and in the repressive, take over every minutia of life aspect. He was also better than the average bear at directing the economic life of the country which is why before his death we used to go shop in Spain, where more and better goods were available than in Portugal.
Relatively speaking, Salazar was a softer leader. Or at least, he stomped less on the opposition (while making more noises about stomping. It’s the Portuguese way.) But as an economic leader (director of the economic life. Führer if you will. Or where did you think that came from?) he sucked. He sucked upside down and sideways and with his head in a sack. And that’s because he was raised by Jesuits, and got his economic theories from them. Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. So over his rule, everyone became increasingly poorer. But weirdly not incompetent. (In fact, as a person who — there and here — likes to follow craftsmen around watching how they do things, the average craftsman who learned his trade under national socialism, was probably way better than anyone else.)
Which brings us to: how does international socialism/communism not only destroy competency but introduce incompetency and corruption to the degree it is enforced/implemented.
Abandoned: How The Beeching Report Decimated Britain’s Railways | Timeline
Timeline – World History Documentaries
Published 15 May 2019Travel journalist Simon Calder takes a journey from across the south of England — by bike, rail and car. In this documentary film, Simon explores the legacy of the Beeching railway cuts. He examines the arguments for reopening some of the branch lines axed in the 1960s.
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Giving up vegetables for Lent
Felipe Fernández-Armesto on updating the traditional Christian observance of Lent for our virtue-signalling, social media age:
“Bruegel the Elder, Fight between Carnival and Lent, detail 6” by f_snarfel is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
For Lent, I am abstaining from vegetables. It may seem counter-intuitive, because “Carnival” or “Carni Vale” — which the English in their glum way call “Shrove Tuesday” and the French, more cheerfully, call “Mardi Gras” — means “Goodbye to Meat”.
The worldly, historic purpose of Lent is to eke out deficient livestock, doomed, unless slaughtered, to die, emaciated and inedible, on sparse or frozen pastures. Nowadays, however, vegetables seem a sacrifice both reasonable and pious.
If I wanted to be lampooned in Private Eye, I’d say that vegetables are the new meat: marketed as dietetically superior, and flattering to a moral form of snobbery.
Like meat in the old days, they are the preferred food of people who want to look down on the rest of us. Flesh and fish are now humbling meals, consumed in self-abasement. “Veganuary” and “Dry January” — wicked, secularist attempts to subvert the sanctity of Lent — repel me from conventional kinds of penance.
I want to defy the absurd propaganda of meat-haters, who try to shame the ill-informed into vegetarianism with mendacious allegations about the environmental cost of carnivorism. Scientifically, they’re on a par with Pythagoras’s denunciation of “passion proteins” and the meat-phobic campaigns of the nineteenth-century evangelists who hawked joyless, overpriced breakfast cereals.
I also want to expose the folly of people who, in flight from the butcher’s shop, grab textured soy concentrate from supermarket shelves: theirs is the idiocy of the ersatz. If you want something like meat, have meat. If you don’t want meat, have something unlike it. My sacrifice would be greater, of course, if I disliked rare steaks and juicy roasts. But I like vegetables, too. So that’s all right.
Roman Battle Tactics
Historia Civilis
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Website | http://historiacivilis.comMusic is Beethoven’s Sonata 8, ‘Pathetique’ – II. Adagio cantabile, performed by Daniel Veesey
QotD: SJW white guilt
In short, reading shit like this is penance for being white. Subjecting themselves to a stream of invective about their failings for being white gives them absolution. It’s kinda like those folks in the BDSM community who seek out a black dominatrix to work out their guilty feelings, and having paid for verbal abuse and a beating, feel that they’ve done their bit for race relations, and for the liberal side of the SF community, Mistress Nora is just the ticket, and they are paying her with sales and awards for all the abuse they can stomach.
Dr. Mauser, “Message Received”, Shoplifting in the Marketplace of Ideas, 2019-01-30.
March 28, 2022
Republic to Empire: Catiline, Cicero, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar the Death Spiral
Update 6 Feb 2024: Dr. Gabb replaced the original part 7 which discussed the cultural impact of Ancient Greece on the rising Roman Republic.
seangabb
Published 20 Feb 2021
In 120 BC, Rome was a republic with touches of democracy. A century later, it was a divine right military dictatorship. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.Here is the seventh lecture, which discusses the Catiline Conspiracy and the rise and disintegration of the First Triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. There is a digression on Eastern politics and the Parthian Empire.
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The only question in my mind is why the NDP thought they’d benefit from propping up Trudeau the Lesser
The editors at The Line, having taken last week off to look after kids on March break, sent out a brief round-up post on the deal Jagmeet Singh made with the Devil Justin Trudeau to keep the Liberals comfortably in power for (potentially) the full term:
The key question here that we can’t really think up an answer for is what this deal changes. In big picture terms, the NDP is going to keep the Liberals alive for a while, and the Liberals will serve up some goodies the NDP base will like. That’s what the parties have agreed to, distilled to the most basic essence.
And this is new how? This has changed what?
The NDP doesn’t want an election right now. The Liberals don’t want an election right now. The Liberals are led by a guy who has already moved the party toward the left and seemed quite happy to do it. The Liberals were getting along just fine with NDP support until they rolled the electoral dice and tried to secure a majority in summer of 2021; they fell short, and now they’ll continue getting along just fine with NDP support.
Well, gee. Stop the presses.
Yes, yes, there’s more specific commitments. The parties have put on paper what they’ll work jointly to achieve. But look at those commitments. Anything surprising? Is this not precisely what any random collection of reasonably bright high schoolers in a mandatory civics class could have guessed when their teacher told them to write a five-paragraph essay on things the NDP and Liberals agree on?
We aren’t particularly swayed by arguments, largely from angry Conservatives, that this deal suddenly leaves the Liberals immune from accountability. Again, the NDP was already playing ball to avoid an election. A week ago, the Liberals were going to be held precisely as accountable as Singh found convenient, and that’s just as true now as it was then. It’s not that the angry Conservatives are wrong about the Liberals being immune from accountability. It’s just that they essentially already were, NDP protestations aside. The NDP will tighten the screws enough to make Trudeau uncomfortable but not enough to trigger an election. They won’t be an opposition, but they’ll play one on TikTok. This sucks, but it is what it is, folks.
Nor do we expect the deal to last the full four years. Hey, it could happen. Both parties could find reasons to keep it going. But remember: this is a gentlemen’s agreement between gentlemen that don’t like each other. Gentlemen who are both pursuing different personal and political agendas. This deal will last right up until the moment one of them sees more advantage in stabbing the other guy than in continuing to play nice-nice.
We admit we really aren’t sure what the Liberals are thinking here. Trudeau had a largely free hand already. This is, to us, baffling.
And as for the NDP, well, gosh, all we can say is good luck, fellers. An old grizzled political observer your Line editors once knew liked to joke that being the junior partner in these kinds of arrangements is like being the mistress of a rich, married man. If you don’t know that you will be dumped while your former lover runs back to his family — the base voters, the caucus, the donors — well, sorry, sweetheart, but that’s on you. We saw a version of this play out in Ontario just a few years ago: the provincial NDP propped up the minority Liberals in exchange for a pledge to cut auto-insurance premiums. The Liberals failed to deliver, ran another election, won another majority and shrugged off the NDP’s complaints. The auto-insurance promise? Meh. That was just a stretch goal.
The Battle of Taranto: When Biplanes Crippled a Fleet
Historigraph
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QotD: The evolution of tanks through World War 2
The Germans, in contrast, made one error after another when it came to tank design and tank building. They were obsessed with coming up with the biggest, most powerful tank, rather than making lots of good enough tanks. The result was lots of innovative designs, but most were failures and there was never enough of them. The Panzer IV was a very good tank with a platform that was flexible, but the Germans kept trying to come up with a super tank, rather than make lots of these. That was a costly error.
The American tank, which was used by the British, was not a great tank, but they were cheap and reliable, which meant there were loads of them. It was also a flexible platform for all sorts of other uses. The Sherman tank was about using the two advantages the Americans had over the Germans. One was more industry and the other was more soldiers. The plan was to beat the Germans with volume. While it would take five Sherman tanks to take out a German tank, that was math that worked in favor of the Americans.
This conflict between the perfect and the good enough showed up in many places during the war. The Germans seemed to look at the whole thing as an engineering project. The first step was to accept the restraints and then solve for the variables. The Russian and American view was always to limit the constraints and thereby increase the number of possible right answers. The Germans had much better human capital, but their opponents always had many more choices. They also had numbers, which counts for a lot.
The Z Man, “Tanking It”, The Z Blog, 2019-03-01.
March 27, 2022
American Army Finally Does Something Right – WW2 – 187 – March 26, 1943
World War Two
Published 26 Mar 2021The British are attacking the Mareth Line in North Africa while the Americans hit the Axis flank, but the Allies are withdrawing in Burma. It’s the Germans who are pulling back in the USSR, though, and there is another attempt from within German Command to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
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The zombie Russian empire under Tsar Vladimir I
In the most recent Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan looks at the quasi-Imperial goals of Vladimir Putin:
Imperial Standard of the Emperor of Russia, used from 1858 to 1917.
Image by Trajan 117 via Wikimedia Commons.
“The huge iceberg Russia, frozen by the Putin regime, cracked after the events in Crimea; it has split from the European world, and sailed off into the unknown,” – Vladimir Sorokin, New York Review of Books, 2017.
The greatest mistake liberals make when assessing reactionaryism is to underestimate it. There is a profound, mesmerizing allure — intensified by disillusion with the shallows of modernity — to the idea of recovering some great meaning from decades or centuries gone by, to resurrect and resuscitate it, to blast away all the incoherence and instability of post-modern life into a new collective, ancient meaning.
Even when it’s based on bullshit. You’d be amazed how vacuous slogans about returning to a mythical past — “Make America Great Again!”, “Take Back Control!” — can move public opinion dramatically in even the most successful modern democracies. That’s one reason it’s self-defeating for liberals to press for maximal change in as many things as possible. National identity, fused often with ethnic heritage, has not disappeared in the human psyche — as so many hoped or predicted. It has been reborn in new and strange forms. Now is the time of monsters, so to speak. Best not to summon up too many.
This, it seems to me, is what many of us have missed about the newly visible monster of post-Communist Russia. It would be hard to conjure up a period of post-modern bewilderment more vividly than Russia in the post-Soviet 1990s. A vast empire collapsed overnight; an entire totalitarian system, long since discredited but still acting as some kind of social glue and cultural meaning, unraveled in chaos and confusion.
Take away a totalitarian ideology in an instant, and a huge vacuum of meaning will open up, to be filled by something else. We once understood this. When Nazi Germany collapsed in total military defeat, the West immediately arrived to reconstruct the society from the bottom up. We de-Nazified West Germany; we created a new constitution; we invested massively with the Marshall Plan, doing more for our previous foe than we did for a devastated ally like Britain. We filled the gap. Ditto post-1945 Japan.
But we left post-1991 Russia flailing, offering it shock therapy for freer markets, insisting that a democratic nation-state could be built — tada! — on the ruins of the Evil Empire. We expected it to be reconstructed even as many of its Soviet functionaries remained in place, and without the searing experience of consciousness-changing national defeat. What followed in Russia was a grasping for coherence, in the midst of national humiliation. It was more like Germany after 1918 than 1945. It is no surprise that this was a near-perfect moment for reactionism to stake its claim.
It came, like all reactionary movements, not from some continuous, existing tradition waiting to be tweaked or deepened, but from intellectuals, making shit up. They created a near-absurd mythology they rescued from the 19th and early 20th centuries — packed with pseudo-science and pseudo-history. Russia was not just a nation-state, they argued; it was a “civilization-state”, a whole way of being, straddling half the globe and wrapping countless other nations and cultures into Mother Russia’s spiritual bosom. Russians were genetically different — infused with what the reactionary theorist Lev Gumilev called “passionarity” — a kind of preternatural energy or will to power. They belonged to a new order — “Eurasia” — which would balance the Atlantic powers of the US and the UK, and help govern the rest of the world.
Book Review: The Uzi Submachine Gun Examined, by David Gaboury
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Aug 2017The UZI Submachine Gun: Examined is a newly published book this year by David Gaboury — long time owner and operator of the uzitalk.com forum. Until now there has not really been any substantive written reference material on the Uzi, but Gaboury has certainly changed that!
The Uzi has not really seen many major variations in its design beyond the Uzi/Mini Uzi/Micro Uzi scaling (and the semiauto and full auto variations of each), but it has lived two rather distinct lives. One is the Uzi as a global military arm, and the other is the Uzi as an American commercial product — and this book covers both in excellent detail.
On the military side, the book begins with a substantial chapter on the initial development of the Uzi and Israeli submachine gun trials. A remarkably wide variety of guns were considered by the Israeli armed forces, and the trial ultimately came down to two domestic designs. The influence of the Czech ZK-476 and SA vz 23/4/5/6 designs are well explained, and much of the mythology about where the design came from is dispelled. Gaboury makes good use of both original documentary sources and firsthand conversation with those who were involved at the time to tell this story.
With the gun accepted, in production, and becoming very popular with Israeli troops, international sales become a possibility. Gaboury covers the adoption of the gun by the Dutch armed forces, followed by the German and South African militaries — as well as the licensed production by FN. He also examines other copies and adaptations, including Croatian, Japanese, and Chinese.
The second half of the Uzi story is that of its sale in the United States (including the use by US security organizations including the Secret Service). This is a story every bit as complex and detailed as the international military use of the gun, as US legal changes in 1968, 1986, 1989, 1994, and 2004 all play a major role in dictating changes that must be made to the guns for import and sale. In particular, Gaboury has detailed chapters on the major sellers of Uzis in the US — Action Arms, Group Industries, and Vector Arms (as well as many other smaller players).
While there may not be many major variations of the Uzi, there are a multitude of smaller changes to individual parts in both design and production technique, and Gaboury covers these in remarkable detail. If there is a flaw to the book, it is not in lack of detail, but perhaps in a bit of dryness to the writing. The information is clearly presented, but not particularly engaging to the reader who is only mildly interested in the subject. This is a minor criticism, however, and the book is an outstanding reference for anyone who has, well, really any questions at all about the Uzi.
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QotD: Period culture in old movies and TV shows
What that meant is if you wanted to know what it was like to live in 1945, you had to ask someone who was alive in 1945. You could get a little taste of it from watching old movies on a Saturday afternoon, but that was a stylized version. To really get a feel for the age before color movies and television, you had to rely on the fading memories of grandma and grandpa. Of course, this was true for all of human history until recent. It’s why old people are good at telling stories about the old days. They’re built for it.
Today it is different. I watched The Thomas Crown Affair the other night off the Kodi machine. This was the 1968 version with Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen. There was a remake of this in 1999 with Pierce Bronson. I had seen the remake a few times, but I never saw the original. In fact, I did not know there was an original. That’s a bit of interesting cultural data right there. Just about every movie produced over the last twenty-five years is either a remake or made from a children’s comic book.
What I found remarkable about the movie is something I notice whenever I watch old movies and that is the maturity. A movie about the cat and mouse between a male and female today will have at least half an hour of rutting and humping, along with some explosions and lots of vulgar language. The modern presentation of male-female relations is so crude, that porn makers of the past would have been offended. In the old days, the film maker and audience expected a more sophisticated portrayal of sexual relations.
That is the other thing that turns up in old movies and television. Hollywood made assumptions about the cultural awareness of the audience we don’t see now. In The Thomas Crown Affair, there is a long scene around a chess game. It was supposed to be a stand in for the sexual tension between McQueen and Dunaway. It’s a bit ham-handed, but vastly more sophisticated than anything you would see today. One reason is the typical viewer today knows nothing about chess, so it would be lost on them.
Part of that is due to Hollywood relying on international audiences to make money. You can’t expect to make money in China or India when your film is full of essential references to Anglo-Saxon cultural items. When you make films for the universal culture, you are making movies for a culture that does not exist. That means the goal is to remove cultural references, rather than rely on them to tell a story. There can be no subtlety and nuance without common cultural reference points understood by the audience.
The Z Man, “Old Movies”, The Z Blog, 2019-02-13.
March 26, 2022
Hollywood: Government Propaganda? – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 24 Mar 2022Along with its arsenal of carriers, bombers, and tanks, America has perhaps the most powerful weapon of all: Hollywood. Hollywood is pumping out American and Allied propaganda as quickly as it can. But was this always the case?
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