The Athenian historian Thucydides once remarked that Sparta was so lacking in impressive temples or monuments that future generations who found the place deserted would struggle to believe it had ever been a great power. But even without physical monuments, the memory of Sparta is very much alive in the modern United States. In popular culture, Spartans star in film and feature as the protagonists of several of the largest video game franchises. The Spartan brand is used to promote obstacle races, fitness equipment, and firearms. Sparta has also become a political rallying cry, including by members of the extreme right who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Sparta is gone, but the glorification of Sparta — Spartaganda, as it were — is alive and well.
Even more concerning is the U.S. military’s love of all things Spartan. The U.S. Army, of course, has a Spartan Brigade (Motto: “Sparta Lives”) as well as a Task Force Spartan and Spartan Warrior exercises, while the Marine Corps conducts Spartan Trident littoral exercises — an odd choice given that the Spartans were famously very poor at littoral operations. Beyond this sort of official nomenclature, unofficial media regularly invites comparisons between U.S. service personnel and the Spartans as well.
Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other”, a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society.
To start with, the Spartan reputation for military excellence turns out to be, on closer inspection, mostly a mirage. Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War — but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered.
Bret Devereaux, “Spartans Were Losers”, Foreign Policy, 2023-07/22.
June 2, 2024
QotD: The Spartans do not deserve the admiration of the modern US military
June 1, 2024
So who did write Shakespeare’s plays?
Mere mortals might be tempted to answer “Well, Shakespeare, duh!”, but to the dedicated conspiracist, the obvious is never the right answer:
This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.
Was Shakespeare a fraud? The American writer Jodi Picoult seems to think so. Her latest novel By Any Other Name is based on the premise that William Shakespeare was not the real author of his plays. Specifically, in her story, the poet Emilia Lanier (née Bassano) pays Shakespeare for the use of his name so that she might see her work staged at a time when female playwrights were extremely rare.
The theory that Shakespeare was a woman isn’t original to Picoult. As with all conspiracy theories relating to the bard, the “true” Shakespeare is identified as one of the upper echelons of society (although not an aristocrat, Lanier was part of the minor gentry thanks to her father’s appointment as court musician to Queen Elizabeth I). Those known as “anti-Stratfordians” – i.e., those who believe that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon called William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him – invariably favour candidates who had direct connections to the court. The general feeling seems to be that a middle-class lad from a remote country town could not possibly have created such compelling depictions of lords, ladies, kings and queens.
[…]
The notion that the actor Shakespeare could have hired out his identity to Lanier, or anyone else for that matter, makes no sense if one considers the collaborative nature of the theatrical medium. Shakespeare was the house playwright for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (the company that became the King’s Men on the accession of James I). His job was to oversee productions, to write on the hoof, to adapt existing scripts in the process of rehearsal. (This is probably why his later plays such as Henry VIII contain so many stage directions; at this point he was almost certainly residing in Stratford-upon-Avon, and so was not available to provide the necessary detail in person.) It was never simply a matter of Shakespeare dropping off his latest script at The Globe and quickly scarpering. If he was being fed the lines, it is implausible that nobody in the company would have noticed.
[…]
The theory that Shakespeare’s contemporaries – fans and critics alike – would all collude in an elaborate deception requires a full explanation. The burden of proof is very much on the anti-Stratfordians, but proof doesn’t appear to be their priority. They seem to think they know more about Shakespeare than those who actually lived and worked with him. It’s oddly hubristic.
All of this nonsense began with the Baconian theory propounded by James Wilmot in 1785 and has never gone away. The candidates are usually university educated and aristocratic: Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of Oxford – even Queen Elizabeth I has been proposed. The anti-Stratfordian position seems to be based on a combination of class snobbery and presentism. They assume that the middle-class son of a glover who did not attend university could not have developed the range of knowledge needed to inform his plays. They forgot, or do not know, that the grammar school education of the time would have provided a firm grounding in the classics. Shakespeare would have been steeped in Ovid, Cicero, Plautus, Terence, and much more besides. Let’s not forget that Ben Jonson, the most scholarly of all his contemporaries, didn’t go to university either.
Moreover, the plays make clear that Shakespeare was a voracious reader. The idea that one must have direct experience in order to write about a subject is very much in keeping with the obsessions of our time, particularly the notion of “lived experience” and how writers ought to “stay in their lane”.
As I’ve joked in the past, I believe the theory that Homer didn’t actually write The Iliad and The Odyssey … it was another Greek chap of the same name.
From Sic semper tyrannis to the “Non-Aggression Principle”
On Substack Notes, kulak points out that the beliefs that led to the American colonists taking up arms against King George’s government don’t expire:
A statue idealizing the individual minutemen who would compose the militia of the United States.
Postcard image of French’s Concord Minuteman statue via Wikimedia Commons.
One of the things that drives me nuts about people who claim to subscribe to modern libertarianism (as opposed to the American Revolutionary ideology) is the claim to be “peaceful” and “antiwar”
Libertarianism isn’t antiwar. The American founding values aren’t antiwar. They never have been. It is a permanent declaration of war.
Live Free or Die
Sic Semper Tyrannis.
“Thus always to tyrants”
When does “always” end? NEVER
If those values succeed then 10,000 years from after your descendants have forgotten the name of America itself, they will be killing tyrants and carving their hearts from their chest.
Libertarianism is not “peaceful” it is a declaration that no peace shall ever exist again. That a free people will never have peace with any who’d seek to rule them. Eternal civil war against all would-be tyrants from the pettiest to the most grandiose.
The “non-aggression principle” does not state that the libertarian my never aggress against another … It states only that he may not aggress FIRST, afterwards any and all aggression, even the most disproportionate, is permitted.
“Taxation is Theft” is the claim that a tax collector or government agent paid out of taxes has the same moral status as burglar/home invader caught in your child’s bedroom. It is the claim that that those who benefit and enable the welfare programs paid out of your taxes have the same moral protection from your wrath should you gain the upper hand as a mugger actively threatening you with a gun lest you hand over your wallet.
“Taxation is Theft” necessarily justifies just as revolutionary and total a upset in the political order as “Property is Theft” did … because theft inherently is a violation of your extended person to be resisted without restriction. And just as the Communist claim of “property is theft” justified the most total and brutal wars in human history to destroy the social order (and social classes) who made “property” possible. Libertarianism and “Taxation is Theft” must necessarily justify just as extreme a charnel house to render “Taxation” impossible.
“Live Free or Die” is necessarily, and has always been a declaration of war upon those who would choose not to “live free”, or remain loyal to a tyrant or master.
The founding fathers didn’t make nice with the Loyalists who remained faithful the crown: They ethnically cleansed large portions of them equal to 4% the US population (notably the Loyalist Dutch of New York), confiscated their lands, and drove them into Canada, several mothers with babes nearly starving. Then they invaded them again in 1812. (Read Tigre Dunlop’s interviews with the survivors in Canada in “Recollections on the War of 1812”).
What Loyalists who managed to remain in the US did not regain full rights as citizens until after the war of 1812, almost 40 years after the revolution.
So if you claimed to believe in “Libertarianism” or the American Revolution, ask yourself: “Do I really believe in Liberty and the American Revolution? Or am I a just a flavor of Progressive Democrat who thinks the income tax should be slightly lower?”
Signed,
A Canadian Descended from Loyalists
Guilty!34
The New York City jury did what the presiding judge told them to do and returned a “guilty” verdict on all charges against former US President Donald Trump. Sentencing is apparently going to take several weeks, because … reasons, I guess. eugyppius provides the German media’s gleeful response to the verdicts:
Der Spiegel‘s characteristically dignified, restrained way to present the news.
Yesterday, a Manhattan jury found former US President Donald J. Trump guilty of 34 felony charges. It is impossible to describe this highly contrived case clearly in a single paragraph, but the upshot is that hush-money paid to the porn star Stormy Daniels violated campaign spending limits, amounted to tax fraud, or constituted an attempt to unlawfully influence the 2016 election – either all of these things at once, or some mixture of them.
The naked political motivations of the prosecution are so obvious that they preempt all possible commentary. In the United States, the establishment have felt it necessary to fortify their free and open democratic elections against unpalatable outcomes by enlisting the help of the judiciary.
Because the German press are complicit in an essentially identical strategy on this side of the pond, they are thrilled – just thrilled – at Trump’s guilty verdict. Their reporting is as voluminous as it is identical, and it’s hard to keep the different think-pieces, op-eds and articles straight. This one from the Süddeutsche Zeitung is useful mainly for hitting all the common themes:
Guilty. Criminal. From now on, these are the official trademarks of Donald J. Trump, at least for now. He is no longer just the first former US president ever to be criminally charged, and in four different cases at that. He is now the first former US president and current presidential candidate to be convicted in criminal proceedings – unanimously, at least in the first instance. Guilty 34 times over.
Trump is a criminal! He is guilty! It feels so good to say that! Guilty guilty guilty!
After such a judgement, a candidate for the most powerful job in the world should be politically finished. Who can imagine a convicted criminal in the White House? What’s more, Trump is theoretically facing three further and far more important trials. Under civil law, he has already had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for sexual abuse, defamation and illegally inflated assets. But this is the USA of the Trump era, so logic hardly matters …
This is a historic case! It’s hugely important! Even though we’re far from confident it will have any meaningful impact on the election which was the whole point of this farce in the first place!
It was always going to be difficult for someone as polarizing as Donald Trump to get anything remotely like a fair trial, just like poor old Senator Bedfellow in Bloom County:
Mark Steyn, who has had his own bitter experiences with the American “justice” system, on the proceedings of the NYC kangaroo court in the Trump prosecution: “[they wouldn’t] have gone to all this trouble for a fine and a suspended sentence. They want him dead.”
As everybody but the New Guinea tribesmen who ate Joe Biden’s uncle knows by now, Donald J Trump has been found “guilty on all counts” – a quintessentially American expression because, of course, the multiple-counts racket is one of the many perversions of judicial norms that have long disgraced the US courthouse.
[…]
Be that as it may, his legal reasoning would be fine if America were a land of laws, but unfortunately it’s a land of men: whether for the forty-fifth president or a “niche Canadian”, we’re in basic “Who? Whom?” territory, as the Leninists would say. After my own experience of both the New York and Washington appellate benches, I would rate the chances of Trump getting this reversed at the state level as way lower than Mr Otis’s five per cent. It’s the same in my own case: all involved know the DC Court of Appeals is merely an interlude in order to get it wafted up to the US Supreme Court. Likewise with Trump. So we’re betting the farm on John Roberts and that rock-ribbed six-three “conservative” majority on which Republicans have expended so much energy to the exclusion of every other societal lever. And, even were they minded to intervene, as I remarked on-air to Tucker a fortnight before the last so-called election, “A judges’ republic is a contradiction in terms“.
So Mr Otis’s legal arguments have very little real-world meaning in terms of November’s exercise in republican self-government. Meanwhile, back in what passes for reality in the courts of New York, the exciting bit having concluded, we are now back to the leisurely proceduralist folderol: The corrupt Judge Méchant has scheduled sentencing for July 11th. So, for viewers of English courtroom dramas on PBS, there’s none of the traditional “Take him down!”, with the guilty party being led down the steps ten minutes after the verdict to be driven away to begin his sentence. Let me see now, July 11th is, oh, a mere six weeks away, which torpor is also very familiar to me: my own verdict came down in February, but the various post-trial motions keep getting kicked down that endless road.
July 11th is also, as it happens, four days before the GOP convention is due to start in Milwaukee. So, at a time when the presidential nominee should be practising his acceptance speech in front of his bedroom mirror, he will be a thousand miles away waiting to hear whether he is to be belatedly taken down.
Thus, Judge Méchant will have once again subordinated the election calendar to the caprices of his filthy courtroom.
In theory, Trump has been convicted of a crime and could be headed to gaol. Also in theory, his term of confinement could be put on hold pending the outcome of his appeal. But they didn’t do that with Peter Navarro, did they? And it seems highly unlikely to me that they would have gone to all this trouble for a fine and a suspended sentence. They want him dead. If you don’t get that, go over to Larry Hogan’s pad and start cooing over your “respect” for “the rule of law”.
I plead the Pith: a History of the Pith Helmet
HatHistorian
Published Jun 1, 2022A symbol of exploration, tropical adventure, and colonialism, the pith helmet has had a long history since its origins as the salakot, a Philippine sun hat. Through many iterations, it had become one of the most famous hats out there, a powerful part of popular imagination.
The helmets I wear in this video come respectively from a gift from a family friend (so I don’t know where it was bought, https://www.historicalemporium.com/, and Amazon.com. The red tunic comes from thehistorybunker.co.uk
Title sequence designed by Alexandre Mahler
am.design@live.comThis video was done for entertainment and educational purposes. No copyright infringement of any sort was intended.
QotD: When the chimneys rose in London
In Ruth Goodman’s telling, though, the greatest difference between coal and wood fires is the smoke. Smoke isn’t something we think much about these days: on the rare occasions I’m around a fire at all, I’m either outdoors (where the smoke dissipates rapidly except for a pleasant lingering aroma on my jacket) or in front of a fireplace with a good chimney that draws the smoke up and out of the house. However, a chimney also draws about 70% of the fire’s heat — not a problem if you’re in a centrally-heated modern home and enjoying the fire for ✨ambience✨, but a serious issue if it’s the main thing between your family and the Little Ice Age outdoors. Accordingly, premodern English homes didn’t have chimneys: the fire sat in a central hearth in the middle of the room, radiating heat in all directions, and the smoke slowly dissipated out of the unglazed windows and through the thatch of the roof. Goodman describes practical considerations of living with woodsmoke that never occurred to me:
In the relatively still milieu of an interior space, wood smoke creates a distinct and visible horizon, below which the air is fairly clear and above which asphyxiation is a real possibility. The height of this horizon line is critical to living without a chimney. The exact dynamics vary from building to building and from hour to hour as the weather outside changes. Winds can cause cross-draughts that stir things up; doors and shutters opening and closing can buffet smoke in various directions. … From my experiences managing fires in a multitude of buildings in many different weather conditions, I can attest to the annoyance of a small change in the angle of a propped-open door, the opening of a shutter or the shifting of a piece of furniture that you had placed just so to quiet the air. And as for people standing in doorways, don’t get me started.
One obvious adaptation was to live life low to the ground. On a warm day the smoke horizon might be relatively high, but on a cold damp one (of which, you may be aware, England has quite a lot) smoke hovers low enough that even sitting in a tall chair might well put your head right up into it. Far better to sit on a low stool, or, better yet, a nice soft insulating layer of rushes on the floor.
Chimneys did exist before the transition to coal, but given the cost of masonry and the additional fuel expenses, they were typically found only in the very wealthiest homes. Everyone else lived with a central hearth and if they could afford it added smoke management systems to their homes piecemeal. Among the available solutions were the reredos (a short half-height wall against which the fire was built and which would counteract drafts from doorways), the smoke hood (rather like our modern cooktop vent hood but without the fan, allowing some of the smoke to rise out of the living space without creating a draw on the heat), or the smoke bay (a method of constructing an upstairs room over only part of the downstairs that still allowed smoke to rise and dissipate through the roof). Wood smoke management was mostly a question of avoiding too great a concentration in places you wanted your face to be. The switch to coal changed this, though, because coal smoke is frankly foul stuff. It hangs lower than wood smoke, in part because it cools faster, and it’s full of sulfur compounds that combine with the water in your eyes and lungs to create a mild sulfuric acid; when your eyes water from the irritation, the stinging only gets worse. Burning coal in an unvented central hearth would have been painful and choking. If you already had one of the interim smoke management techniques of the wood-burning period — especially the smoke hood — you would have found adopting coal more appealing, but really, if you burned coal, you wanted a chimney. You probably already wanted a chimney, though; they had been a status symbol for centuries.
And indeed, chimneys went up all over London; their main disadvantage, aside from the cost of a major home renovation, had been the way they drew away the heat along with the smoke, but a coal fire’s greater energy output made that less of an issue. The other downside of the chimney’s draw, though, is the draft it creates at ground level. Again, this isn’t terribly noticeable today because most of us don’t spend a lot of time sitting in front of the fireplace (or indeed, sitting on the floor at all, unless we have small children), but pay attention next time you’re by an indoor wood fire and you will notice a flow of cold air for the first inch or two off the ground. All of a sudden, instead of putting your mattress directly on the drafty floor, you wanted a bedstead to lift it up — and a nice tall chair to sit on, and a table to pull your chair up to as well. There were further practical differences, too: because a chimney has to be built into a wall, it can’t heat as large an area as a central fire. This incentivized smaller rooms, which were further enabled by the fact that a coal fire can burn much longer without tending than a wood fire. A gentleman doesn’t have much use for small study where he can retreat to be alone with his books and papers if a servant is popping in every ten minutes to stir up the fire, but if the coals in the grate will burn for an hour or two untended he can have some real privacy. The premodern wood-burning home was a large open space where many members of the household, both masters and servants, went about their daily tasks; the coal-burning home gradually became a collection of smaller, furniture-filled spaces that individuals or small groups used for specific purposes. Nowhere is this shift more evident than in the word “hall”, which transitions from referring to something like Heorot to being a mere corridor between rooms.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.
1. Brief ferrous metallurgy digression: aside from the rare, relatively pure iron found in meteors, all iron found in nature is in the form of ores like haematite, where the iron bound up with oxygen and other impurities like silicon and phosphorus (“slag”). Getting the iron out of the ore requires adding carbon (for the oxygen to bond with) and heat (to fuel the chemical reaction): Fe2O3 + C + slag → Fe + CO2 + slag. Before the adoption of the blast furnace, European iron came from bloomeries: basically a chimney full of fuel hot enough to cause a reduction reaction when ore is added to the top, removing the oxygen from the ore but leaving behind a mass of mixed iron and slag called a bloom. The bloom would then be heated and beaten and heated and beaten — the hot metal sticks together while the slag crumbles and breaks off — to leave behind a lump of nearly pure iron. (If you managed the temperature of your bloomery just right you could incorporate some of the carbon into the iron itself, producing steel, but this was difficult to manage and carbon was usually added to the iron afterwards to make things like armor and swords.) In a blast furnace, by contrast, the fuel and ore were mixed together and powerful blasts of air were forced through as the material moved down the furnace and the molten iron dripped out the bottom. From there it could be poured directly into molds and cast into the desired shape. This is obviously much faster and easier! But cast iron has much more carbon, which makes it very hard, lowers its melting point, and leaves it extremely brittle — you would never want a cast iron sword. (The behavior of various ferrous metals is determined by the way the non-metal atoms, especially carbon, interrupt the crystal structure of the iron. Wrought iron has less than .08% carbon by weight, modern “low carbon” steel between .05% and .3%, “high carbon” steel about 1.7%, and cast iron more than 3%.)
2. The sales of those cooking implements went on to provide the capital for further innovation: Darby’s son and grandson, two more Abrahams, also played important roles in the Industrial Revolution.
May 31, 2024
“You only support that because it’s in your self-interest to do so”
Helen Dale considers the painful notion that political ideas that work for the “elite” (defined in various ways) may not work at all for people unlike members of any given “elite”:
When I reviewed Rob Henderson’s Troubled for Law & Liberty at Liberty Fund, I made this observation:
The reality that classical liberalism — the closest to my own political views, I admit — has at least a whiff of the luxury belief around it stings. It’s discomforting to acknowledge that what goes by the name of paternalism has its own intellectual pedigree, while liberalism can be a system developed by the clever, for the clever. “Highly educated and affluent people are more economically conservative and socially liberal,” Henderson says. “This doesn’t make sense. The position is roughly that people shouldn’t have to adhere to norms and if/when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available. It’s a luxury belief.”
[…]
Joseph Heath […] uses the phrase “self-control aristocracy” to describe those who really do benefit from maximal freedom. These are people who can make better choices for themselves than any authority could make on their behalf. When the state or large corporates boss them (us) around, they (we) get really bloody annoyed. They (we) know better!
Heath’s phrase is simply a layman’s term for the personality trait various formal tests measure, and which overlaps with executive function to a considerable but as yet unknown degree.
Because I am self-conscious about my membership in the self-control aristocracy, I am acutely aware of the fact that, when I think about questions of “individual liberty” in society, I come to it with a particular set of class interests. That is because I stand to benefit much more from an expansion of the space of individual liberty than the average person does – because I have greater self-control. So I recognize that, while a 24-hour beer store would be great for me, it would be a mixed blessing for others […]
What does this have to do with libertarianism? It is important because every academic proponent of libertarianism – understood loosely, as any doctrine that assigns individual liberty priority over other political values – is a member of the self-control aristocracy. As a result, they are advancing a political ideal that benefits themselves to a much greater extent than it benefits other people. In most cases, however, they do so naively, because they do not recognize themselves as members of an elite, socially-dominant group, that stands to benefit disproportionately. They think of liberty as something that creates an equal benefit for all.
My response to reading Professor Heath’s piece was simplicity itself: I feel seen. I’ve even done the night school thing while working full-time. I’ve written books and chosen to play sports that require a long time and lots of skill to master. I retired at 45.
Politically, I’m not a libertarian. Libertarianism is a distinctive and largely American ideology (as the recent and bonkers fracas at its US Convention indicates) with philosophically unusual deontological roots. I am, however, within the British and French tradition of classical liberalism (which does assign individual liberty priority over other political values). And like many classical liberals I’ve been blind to problems of laws and governance for people unlike me.
I disclose this because I’ve worked in policy development in both devolved and national parliaments. I’ve probably given politicians and civil servants alike dud advice. There is almost certainly a shit policy out there (in either Scotland or Australia) with my name on it. However, this mind-blindness doesn’t only apply to people who advocate libertarian politics. I think it applies to a significant number of political ideologies just as strongly as it does to libertarianism.
That is, the ideology serves the inherited personality traits of those who promote it. “You only support that because it’s in your self-interest to do so” always struck me as a genuinely mean criticism of people who were involved in politics and policy (I may have been one of those people, natch). The problem — as I’ve been forced to accept — is that it’s true.
The best that can be said about VIA Rail is that its financials aren’t as dire as Canada Post
Chris Selley outlines the financial black holes that are the two Crown Corporations — Canada Post and VIA Rail Canada:
VIA Rail 918, a General Electric model P42DC locomotive, at Belleville, Ontario on 23 December 2008.
Photo by Martin Cathrae via Wikimedia Commons.
If you’re unfamiliar with Via’s financials, I’ll advise you to sit down now.
In 2023, the average passenger on The Canadian line [Toronto/Montreal to Vancouver] was subsidized by the taxpayer to the tune of $1,014.77. Revenues on the route were less than half of expenses. And your average Canadian can’t even hope to ride the bastard thing: A bunk bed for the 34 hours and 35 minutes it takes to get from Toronto to Winnipeg still goes for the bargain price of $895.
It’s a cruise ship. Not only are we lavishly subsidizing a cruise ship, but we own the cruise line, and we’re buying it new ships. It’s absolutely bananas. And among those applauding the expenditure is, somehow, the NDP’s transport critic Taylor Bachrach. Where’s simplistic populism when you need it? No money for cruise ships!
Meanwhile, media are being far too indulgent of Via’s alarming and increasing vagueness as to whether it’s committed to “high-frequency rail” on the Toronto-to-Quebec City corridor, or to “high-speed rail”, or to some combination of both. This could not be a bigger or brighter red flag: Beware of Oncoming Boondoggle.
Committing billions of dollars to a new rail corridor between Toronto and Quebec City without a firm idea as to whether it’s “high-frequency” or “high-speed” is a bit like committing billions to a new housing development without knowing whether it’s bungalows or high-rise condos. A train going 300 kilometres per hour, or more (i.e., high-speed rail) needs vastly more protection (fences, eliminating level crossings) than a train going 200 kilometres per hour. It’s not a minor detail or something to be worked out later.
And it’s painfully obvious why Via’s executives are sowing the confusion: Because the high-frequency rail plan that they actually have simply isn’t that compelling. It may offer no time savings at all between Montreal and Toronto — and anyone who tries to tell you a five-hour trip between Montreal and Toronto is a compelling option for business people is either a deluded railfan or works for Via.
“Canada charts path for high-speed trains, but obstacles loom,” a recent Globe and Mail headline declared, completely incorrectly. But casual news consumers can absolutely be forgiven for thinking Via’s working on a Toronto-to-Quebec City version of France’s TGV. Should the high-frequency rail plan ever get built, I can only imagine the kvetching and disappointment that would follow.
How To Install a Pipeline Under a Railroad
Practical Engineering
Published Feb 20, 2024I’m on location to document the installation of a water transmission line below two railroad tracks.
Huge thanks to our project partners!
Owner: Crystal Clear Special Utility District
General Contractor: ACP
(more…)
QotD: Progressives believe you need to be changed to their design
This is a crucial difficulty, and it gives rise to all sorts of persuasion, nudging, compulsion, and outright violence. If the masses don’t know what’s good for them, they must be made to change. Every liberal in history, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Barack Obama, has adopted this course of action. The current liberal lions, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, and their lion cubs – New Jersey’s Sen. Cory Booker and California’s Sen. Kamala Harris – appear to be even more radical.
Booker speaks repeatedly in favor of what he calls “the collective good”. Apparently, he knows what that good is, and others do not. And he seems willing to use uncivil means to achieve that collectivist end, such as lashing out at DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. His humiliation of Nielsen was not just embarrassing. As I saw it, it revealed a cold, vicious, Leninist temperament, a willingness to sacrifice individuals in the service of the collective and of his own political ambition.
Then there is Harris. “Loose regulations and lax enforcement … That’s abandoning the middle class,” she says. What she seeks, apparently, is more government control with herself in charge.
Both of these über-liberals claim to know more than the rest of us, but what is it they know?
In a truth worthy of Wittgenstein, one could say that what they “know” is that they know, and nothing else. And what they oppose is any suggestion that they do not know.
In other words, liberalism is a temper, not a philosophy. It has no fixed content – it can be either communistic or fascistic, racially “progressive” or virulently anti-Semitic, pacifistic or militaristic – but in one respect, it never changes. It exerts control and demands obedience.
Jeffrey Folks, “Leftists versus the People”, American Thinker, 2018-02-24.
May 30, 2024
As everyone knows, it takes at least three years to find a shovel in Canada …
In Quillette, Jonathan Kay notes the third anniversary of the “mass graves” moral panic here in the utterly dysfunctional Dominion:
Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
This week marked the third anniversary of Canada’s strange “unmarked graves” scandal — a morbid social panic that took hold of my country in late May 2021, following unverified claims that the corpses of 215 (presumably murdered) Indigenous children had been located at the site of a former school in Kamloops, British Columbia.
As I’ve already described this saga in several Quillette articles, I will not belabour the specifics (which, by now, have also been covered in the international press, as well as Canada’s National Post and Dorchester Review). Instead, this update will focus on the manner by which Canadian public figures (journalists, in particular) have tried to evade accountability for their original gullibility, as it presents an interesting case study in social psychology on a national scale.
The background here, as anyone who’s followed the story closely will know, is a genuinely shameful aspect of Canadian history — the federally funded, church-run system of residential schools established in the nineteenth century as a means to assimilate the country’s Indigenous population. In many cases, children were forced to attend boarding schools located hundreds of miles from their home reserves. Mortality rates from infectious diseases (especially tuberculosis) were tragically high, and the whole issue was properly referred to an authoritative body known as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which concluded that at least 3,200 children died after enrolling in residential schools. The real number might well be considerably higher.
All of this had been common knowledge in Canada for years by the time Rosanne Casimir, Chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in Kamloops claimed to have discovered the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried on the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
In fact, she’d discovered nothing of the kind. But the Canadian media ran with the claim as if it were the proven truth. A typical headline: “Tk’emlups confirms bodies of 215 children buried at former Kamloops Indian Residential School site“.
If you don’t live in Canada, it will be hard to appreciate the national hysteria that resulted. In the press, Canada was officially anointed a nation of baby killers. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau lowered the flag on public buildings for five months. Dozens of churches were burned by arsonists in apparent acts of retribution. The word “genocide” was thrown around in casual parlance as if we were Nazi Germany or Rwanda in 1994. The Canadian Press called the discovery of these ostensible unmarked graves the 2021 “Story of the Year.”
Then the days passed, the national festival of self-laceration abated somewhat, and it began dawning on some of us that — um, wait a minute — no evidence of graves had actually been presented yet. That evidence was on its way, right?
The Bloody Birth of Socialist Yugoslavia
World War Two
Published May 29, 2024In the final months of the war, Partisan leader Josip Tito and his forces complete their conquest of Yugoslavia. They destroy Draza Mihailovic’s Chetniks and Ante Pavelic’s Croatian Independent State and they outmanoeuvre King Peter. As Tito’s forces take revenge on their vanquished foes, Socialist Yugoslavia is born in a cradle of fire and blood.
02:08 Mihailovic’s Last Roll of the Dice
04:35 Tito Aligns himself with the Soviets
07:06 Albania
08:25 Tito begins state building
10:51 Hoxha purges his enemies
12:00 The Fall of Mihailović
13:08 The End of the Independent State of Croatia
14:54 The Events at Bleiburg
17:08 The Massacres
19:41 The Birth of Socialist Yugoslavia
20:54 Conclusion
(more…)
The Liberal Party of Canada, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Trudeau, Inc.
In The Line, Stefan Klietsch ponders the idea that a lot of the problems the Trudeau Liberals are encountering in the run-up to the next federal election are direct or indirect effects of the constitutional changes Trudeau pushed through at the first party general meeting after he became Prime Minister:
With the ongoing and persistent slump of Justin Trudeau’s party in the polls, some observers have looked back at what caused the Sunny Ways team to lose its lustre in their years of governing. Some would point to the prime minister’s harassment of Judy-Wilson Raybould in the SNC-Lavalin scandal, an episode in which the prime minister clearly lost the battle for public opinion. One personal grievance of mine is the cynical promise that the prime minister had made of the 2015 election being the last such election under the existing electoral system. Others just point to post-pandemic economic conditions, especially higher interest rates.
But looking back to the very beginning of the Trudeau era, the Liberal leader arguably planted the seeds of his inevitable downfall quite quickly after winning his majority in the 2015 election. I speak here of the constitutional package that Trudeau pushed the Liberal Party of Canada to adopt at its 2016 Biannual General Meeting.
It is a recurring theme in Canadian politics that party leaders who form government tend to become more distant and isolated from their grassroots. But whereas most prime ministers and premiers would be content to delegate management of constitutional party debates to their submissive sycophants, a sitting prime minister took it upon himself to invest his personal brand in an appeal to the party’s convention floor to pass an omnibus “modernizing” constitutional package. Since the prime minister did not again participate in the party’s constitutional debates after 2016, he evidently got everything that he wanted all in one go, and with minimal resistance.
Trudeau’s cynicism here is worthy of mockery. Imagine thinking to yourself, “Just months ago, the rejuvenated grassroots institutions of the Liberal party swept me to power and ended the decade of Liberal decline. Better fix what ain’t broke!” The changes, which included slashing of the influence of Electoral District Associations and of policy conventions, were obviously not intended as some grand exercise in democracy empowerment, but rather were intended to protect an incumbent government from any inconvenient messages and influences from a potentially unruly party grassroots.
Yet it was the same independent party grassroots that had helped bring Trudeau to power in the first place. In the 2015 campaign the Liberals had run on what columnist Andrew Coyne called a “daring” platform, a platform crafted with more input and insight than can be offered by only pollsters and political operatives. The then Liberal platform was obviously a factor in the Liberals’ poaching of supporters from the NDP, which had at times held a lead in the polls. From cannabis legalization to electoral reform to the Canada Child Benefit, where did all the big new Liberal ideas come from? The party grassroots and institutions, of course.
The Dumbest Joint … that all woodworkers need to know
Rex Krueger
Published Feb 21, 2024The half-lap joint, strong and simple. Maybe not monkey simple.
(more…)
QotD: Is a “Pickup Artist” just an amateur method actor performing “fake it until you make it” drills?
Which forces us to consider a second question: How much of Game’s “success” is just practice? I’d wager very long money that no one, in the history of seduction, has ever said “I hit on fifteen girls a day, but I never seem to get anywhere”. And that of course is the very first thing the Game gurus have you do — just approach girls, dozens of them every day. Practice any skill for an hour a day and you’re bound to get a lot better pretty quickly. If you stink at golf, for instance, go hit a bucket of balls every day after work; in a month you’ll be dramatically better than you were, even if — make that especially if — you were terrible to start with.
Then throw in the marketing-style success rate. A 5% sales increase might not seem that big, but it’s millions of dollars. So, too, “scoring with 5% of your approaches” is a stunning success rate compared to 0%, especially since, you know, it’s sex, which our culture has taught us is the only meaningful standard.
Finally, though I will cheerfully admit to never having been a PUA, or anything close to it, I’ve read a fair amount of their stuff, and it seems to me that what they’re teaching is “how to fake self-confidence”, which is to say, they’re teaching Method acting. The theory is that you “fake it ’til you make it” — that is, by acting self-confident at all times, eventually you’ll really be self-confident. That virtue is as virtue does, and vice versa, goes back at least to Aristotle, so I’m certainly not going to argue with it. I’m simply going to point out that self-confidence, though of course very real, is more than just a set of behaviors, though our culture makes it very difficult to distinguish the two … and, worse, makes both of them very difficult to distinguish from “just being an asshole”.
Severian, “Mental Middlemen II: Sex and the City and Self-Confidence”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-06.
