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Post by kungfuzu on Aug 29, 2019 9:31:16 GMT -8
The link is to a brilliant piece by Theodore Dalrymple. Of course, I would say it is brilliant because it agrees with what we have been saying for years, "Misery Loves Company."
I believe the phenomenon which Dalrymple describes is perhaps the greatest motivation of the left. It certainly plays a big part for the perverts, crooks, incompetents, thieves, liars, unattractive and generally mean misfits of that political persuasion. Revenge for slights real or imagined.
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 9, 2019 19:26:49 GMT -8
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on Sept 10, 2019 10:16:26 GMT -8
I happened to read “Phony Vulgarity” by chance. Dalrymple’s overall shtick is that the middle and upper classes are aping the lower classes, and not to anyone’s benefit. Why they do so almost assuredly stems from white guilt and the ingrained soft-pedaling of “people of color.” Or “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” There’s a new book out about the Parkland shootings. NRO has an article. William Marshall also has an article at Townhall: Are American Public Schools Becoming Monster Factories? As one commenter said, “No, they are not becoming monster factories. That process was completed decades ago. They are now monster factories.” The gist of it was that it was considered taboo to penalize a “person of color.” Whites are not to tell “people of color” what they can’t do. That would be cultural imperialism. And if they are acting out, it’s because of “racism.” Disciplining them is just punishing them for the racism of others. Remember, folks, we elected a Leader of the Free World twice who specifically implemented this policy, and in direct association with Parkland. This kind of reverse racism has been so indoctrinated, people now accept it as the ground rules without thinking. It’s certainly got them cowed….to the extent that they let their own children be murdered by the policies no matter how many red flags are being waved. If I were a parent, I would find a way to homeschool my child or at least get them into a private school. As for vulgar language, add that to tattoos, piercings, and degraded manners of dress as ways people are aping the lower classes. Add in drug and sexual libertinism, and you have the makings of a catastrophe. I really do think the 60’s hippies and flower children were the worse generation. If they didn’t actually set this all in motion they gave it strength in numbers. This pining for utopia requires believing a lot of nonsense. And I’ve first-hand seen the quite pathetic attempts of this same group to recapture the utopian dreams that never really were real to begin with. They are a mental and moral wasteland. Individually, they may be quite nice people. But their inability to say “No” to stupid things is their Achilles’ heel. |
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Post by timothylane on Sept 10, 2019 10:50:42 GMT -8
California has decided to virtually ban school suspensions. After all, there is "disparate impact" -- blacks are a lot likelier than whites to be suspended, which therefore proves that all these teachers and administrators (who are overwhelmingly leftist and thus Demagogues) must be racist. (This is the same logic that once led the DC police to ignore criminal backgrounds in hiring police officers. Bet you can guess what happened as a result.)
And when the next Parkland happens, that's a bonus. It provides a good excuse to push for gun confiscation again and inch nearer to that overarching goal (the Overton window again). After all, you never want a good crisis to go to waste.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Sept 10, 2019 12:20:06 GMT -8
Yeah. That sounds like a good summation of what's going on.
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 10, 2019 13:49:25 GMT -8
I may have told you that when I first saw white people copying the silly "gimme-five" and "high-fiving" so popular in the black community I predicted it would not be too long before the whole culture would sink. Some time after that I saw white idiots wearing baseball caps backwards, and then bigger idiots wearing their blue jeans hanging around their asses, and my prediction was confirmed. This should not be surprising as human beings too often are very happy to settle into the lowest-common-denominator level of life.
I only wish there had been some honest and decent way that I could have made a lot of money with my powers of prediction.
I agree. I would not give you a plug nickle for my older brothers' generation (both born in the late 1940s) and that is one of the main reasons I left the USA in my early twenties.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Sept 13, 2019 10:05:24 GMT -8
If I had to condense it down into a single flaw, I would say that is what that generation who made an idol of their emotions. This was not the Clint Eastwoodian “speak softly and carry a big stick” generation. It was the generation that had to “express” every damn feeling. They might not have exactly started it but they gave gave critical mass to the “therapeutic” orientation toward life.
It was the generation that reputed to be “kind” and “nice.” But it proved only to be a modern form of an Indulgence. You can live the completely amoral, almost hedonistic lifestyle. But if you profess “care” the for homeless, you are absolved.
Instead of handling the inherent difficulties and contradictions of life, they went on a revolutionary rampage trying to overturn everything in view. They eventually spawned the age we live in now where no one is ever responsible for anything. It is always someone else’s fault.
This fault is amplified by the naive pining for utopia — especially an emotional utopia. Those not burnt out on that empty desire are/were burnt out on the usual empty pursuits of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. What is the legalization of pot but the culmination of the brain-deadedness of that generation?
And they are still not yet able to face up to their mistakes. They are but children.
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Post by timothylane on Sept 13, 2019 10:24:14 GMT -8
Political expatriation, like everything else, is nothing new. John Dickson Carr (a mystery write most famous for locked rooms -- including one scene in which fictional detective Gideon Fell discussed them as a genre) left America for Britain out of disdain for the New Deal. He returned after World War II, when Clement Attlee as a Labor PM started socializing everything. (For some reason, Britain had to continue rationing long after the war was over. Funny how that works.)
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Sept 13, 2019 10:28:49 GMT -8
It's an interesting question why that lasted so long. Loss of ships and empire? The war state unwilling or unable to roll back and let the market take over? This articles claims to have some answers: Why rationing and shortages continued in Britain after WW2.Short answer: Britain diverted a lot of food to take care of Europe. Crippling debt didn't help either. |
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 13, 2019 11:06:51 GMT -8
I knew a number of people who remembered the rationing until 1955. Like most things, humans can get used to most conditions and are able to adjust accordingly.
The rebuilding of Europe was a huge task and, not surprisingly, took years. I would guess that by the early 1960s, Germany's standard of living was already higher than Great Britain's. Hell, I observed that already in the early 1980s, Singapore's standard of living was higher than that of the U.K.
Great Britain went through two world wars and the collapse of her world empire over a period of about thirty five years. Of course, she still held on to some territories a bit longer, but the Jewel in the Crown, India, said goodbye in 1947.
I suspect, that from a financial point of view, Great Britain would be better off today had she not participated in WWI.
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Post by timothylane on Sept 13, 2019 11:10:53 GMT -8
That doesn't explain coal rationing in a country that produced a surplus of coal. Coal wasn't exactly scarce in Europe, except maybe for a year or so until they could get everything working again. For that matter, they hardly needed to extend food rationing for so long just because of food aid (though that certainly was badly needed right after World War II ended). And a lot of food aid undoubtedly came from the US. So did other aid after the Marshall Plan was passed.
Note that US aid to Britain during the war was Lend-Lease explicitly for war purposes. Naturally that was no longer needed once the war was over -- though in fact it wasn't quite done yet. Britain supported Greece in its struggle against a Communist insurgency for a while, but couldn't afford to keep it up. The US took over the effort after that. (I vaguely recall seeing a TV show on this during the 60s, when there were a lot of history programs. This was after our stay in Greece, and thus of definite interest to me.)
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 13, 2019 11:13:33 GMT -8
I think the concerns I had, almost fifty years ago, about this generation have proven to be correct.
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Post by timothylane on Sept 13, 2019 11:15:57 GMT -8
Niall Ferguson in his study of the Great War, The Pity of War, has made similar points. Britain would have faced a Europe dominated economically by Germany, but it faces that today anyway. And it wouldn't have gone through two world wars, since a Germany victorious in 1914 (which might have happened without the BEF's small but critical role in the Battle of the Marne) wouldn't have taken the turn it did. An early end to the war would have made the results much less harsh no matter who won.
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 13, 2019 11:34:14 GMT -8
I believe the nationalization of the coal industry by the Labour Government in 1946 might have had something to do with coal rationing, and all other rationing for that matter. (wink, wink)
The link below with take you to a Wikipedia piece which gives a brief history of rationing in the U.K. I believe most people would be shocked at the U.K.'s great dependency on imports, especially food. Germany was in a similar situation, which was one of Hitler's impulses for starting the war. He thought the Germans needed Lebensraum and the increased commodities which would come with it, thus making Germany less dependent on other nations.
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Post by timothylane on Sept 13, 2019 12:25:23 GMT -8
The military scholar B. H. Liddell Hart noted that both Germany and Britain could be starved out during the Great War -- but it would take years to starve Germany into submission, whereas Britain could be starved in a matter of weeks if totally cut off from foreign supplies. This was the reason for Germany's determination to use U-boats to shut down British imports -- in both wars. They briefly came close in 1917, but never quite made it. In World War II they never even came close. (This reflected how long it took to get a large enough force, how quickly Britain started convoying, poor quality German torpedoes until 1941, and strong US intervention.)
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Sept 13, 2019 12:34:12 GMT -8
That reminds me of a quote in a good article by VDH that I ran across recently in regards to Island Britain: Could Britain have sat out the first war and then never had to deal with the second one because, as Timothy noted, the Germans would have been victorious? Playing woulda-coulda-shoulda is almost pointless, but still great fun. Perhaps as Timothy says, by sitting out, “Britain would have faced a Europe dominated economically by Germany, but it faces that today anyway.” And German domination has helped to spawn a Muslim invasion: something the Nazis could only dream of. The question is whether or not Britain could have just sat it out. I think if we consider how the U-boats nearly won the war for Germany (whether the first and/or the second), it’s hard to imagine a Britain dependent upon its navy surviving against a German-controlled continent of Europe which could have launched a thousand U-boats eventually. Perhaps the woulda-coulda on the part of the Nazis was wasting all that time trying to bomb Britain. They merely needed more U-boats and the continuing development of anti-anti-submarine warfare. And they might have wanted to take a look at the security of their encryption techniques. I think Mr. Kung has probably nailed the answer in regards to extended rationing: The unions. Every honest period piece in the post-war years that I’ve ever seen (and on into the 60’s and 70’s) notes that Britain was being strangled by the unions. |
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Post by timothylane on Sept 13, 2019 13:24:39 GMT -8
Actually, during World War II U-boat code security was better than the rest of the Wehrmacht. The Enigma machine had 4 rotors, one of which was used to reflect back. Most systems only used 2 of the other 3, but Doenitz activated the 3rd in early 1942. It took the Allies over a year to read them after that, which is why one of their worst months was March 1943. In addition, Kriegsmarine code-breakers in the B-Dienst were reading the Allied merchant marine codes for much of the war. In the final couple of years the Allies had the advantage, but before that it was much more even.
Equally important was HF/DF (high frequency direction-finding aka Huff-Duff). Doenitz made heavy use of the radio and there was heavy communication from his boats (necessary to use wolf packs once they had enough U-boats to do so). The British might not be able to read the messages, but they could locate the sources, which made it easier to hunt down the U-boats. This was especially true when they began doing this at sea instead of relying on shore-based stations, which began in late 1942.
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 13, 2019 13:40:26 GMT -8
I believe few of us realize just how left-wing the British Labour Party was and is again becoming.
I happened to visit England for Christmas vacation from mid-December 1973 to mid-January 1974. This was shortly after a big fight between the coal-miner unions and the Conservative government under Edward Heath. As I recall, the coal miners won and this brought Heath's government down, but I don't recall the exact dates.
Although I did not experience it personally, I remember hearing, and seeing photos in the newspapers, of people having to use candles to light their rooms as there was not enough coal. I also recall thinking how archaic Conservative political discussions were in those days, again from reading the newspapers. They were like something out of the 19th century. There was even an article in Time or Newsweek which went on about how the U.K. might be a model for the rest of us, with its gentle decline and the people's acceptance of a slow slide into irrelevance. I thought the article a load of shit.
Well, Maggie Thatcher learned from Edward Heath's weakness and was prepared for the coal-miners union and their radical leader, Red Arthur Scargill, when they challenged her government. When the union went on strike, Thatcher, who had stockpiled coal, called their bluff and broke the union. It was from that date that the U.K. began to pick up economically and sell off all the nationalized industries.
I have seen the change over the years and it has been huge.
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 13, 2019 13:47:06 GMT -8
There were many structural conflicts which would have made avoiding some type of conflict difficult. The fact that Germany's economy was growing rapidly and threatening the U.K.'s economic position, was probably the biggest problem. But it should also be noted that Great Britain had been playing "Balance of Power" diplomacy on the continent for several hundred years and old habits are hard to change. The had done their best, over the centuries, to keep any one country from becoming too strong and probably saw the Kaiser's Germany as a somewhat more boorish French Empire under Napoleon.
I believe every belligerent nation was caught completely off guard as to the cost and destructiveness of the modern weaponry used.
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Post by kungfuzu on Sept 13, 2019 14:55:57 GMT -8
I don't recall exactly when, but sometime in 1940 or 1941 (I believe) the Brits also captured an intact German Navy Enigma machine (and maybe some code books) when they captured a German U-Boot. For some reason, the German captain or some other officer in charge of the thing, did not destroy it or the U-Boot. Once the Brits could take that machine apart, they could read the Navy's orders for some time.
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