The Means of War

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Cheer up. We’re winning the long war.

And now you’re staring at me as though I’ve lost my mind. I might have. I was fighting typesetting till late last night. But I don’t think so.

It occurred to me sometime ago that we were in a long, sustained war since the beginning of the 20th century. It’s just that war has morphed and gone underground, by other means.

Look, part of this was America’s showing in WWII. Not that it was bad, but that it was very, very good and it showed the ideologies who would conquer the world that they couldn’t do it shoulder-to-shoulder, in serried ranks. I mean they kept threatening us with it, but in fact that time had already passed. (Sometime I need to do a post about how most of threats we’re terrified of are actually things that are no longer possible, or at least highly unlikely.)

So, the ideologies that would conquer the world: it was before Marxism existed, of course, that people became obsessed with idea of a rule “of the people” involving “if only everyone” and also that there was a permanent underclass who needed to rule so they wouldn’t be oppressed.

In fact Marx, the least original thinker in the world, culled his ideas from the kind of red-throated insanity of the French revolution. To be fair to him, all of the civilized word was going through this, processing the shock of the immense violation that the French Revolution represented.

There had been peasant revolts… always pretty much. Look, despite the soft-water-color monarchy fools (mostly tbf European fools, though some people on this side of the Atlantic are … gullible (?Yeah, gullible is a good term)) try to sell you, monarchy and any system with hierarchy dictated by birth which you can neither choose nor change monarchy pretty much sucks and will end up having peasant revolts. (Yes, yes, constitutional monarchy is better. And also depending on the quality of the king, yadda yadda, except that you can’t guarantee the quality of the king, nor vote him out if he’s well…. Biden like. And constitutional monarchy is a way to still have kings for the feel while not having kings for anything practical. BUT in this case, I’m talking about historical, pre-French-revolution monarchy and its problems.)

However the French revolution was shocking like the covidiocy was shocking. It was a ‘this is not even possible’ moment.

And it was possible, suddenly, because of one innovation (this one simple trick!) — the printing press. And the propaganda it enabled.

While media was nowhere near as concentrated as it would become in the late 20th century, the big printing presses and their broadsides were responsible for disseminating the idea of the revolution and spurring people on to revolt, and concentrated enough to have it be in the hands of a wild-eyed bourgeois elite which spurred each other on to insanity. Oh, also, things were pretty sucky to be fair. I mean what fed the fire of the revolution is that the lower classes really were pinched like crazy. And had endured centuries of being treated as subhuman. But still, without the propaganda and the dissemination of ideas, the French peasants revolt would have engulfed a few cities, maybe a province, then fizzled.

That it didn’t scared the living daylights out of everyone in power. Well, and anyone literate, even the people in America who initially supported it, when they realized how ridiculous it had gotten.

Which means that by the early nineteenth century the intellectual establishment was still processing the shock (these things process slowly) and Marx codified the insanity into what sounded like more exact intellectual format.

And then they tried it on. WWI was a sad disappointment for the “Workers of the world” uniting, since apparently they still preferred their national identities. Which then led to fascism, that embraced that and various weird retcons of international socialism, including the very latest attempt here, with DEI, with “race” replacing class (and race being quite inventive as it ended up including women and sexual orientation and… insane little buggers these Marxists.)

Anyway, WWII was even more of a disappointment, at least for the Marxists (red or black bah, let the devil come and choose between them) idea that they could take the world by the force of arms, because it turned out the US had better arms. And thought it was at the time under the grip of a Marxist though not an avowed one, the US refused to do the taking over and occupying thing, since ultimately as a national character we’re terrible imperialists: all we want to do is go home.

Since then, the enemies of the US have been fighting the US by other means.

The most effective, starting right after WWII (or arguably before) was internal corruption and subversion. McCarthy was too late (no, seriously, when you have an hour, go and listen.) and all our institutions have been corrupted by Marxism for way too long. No, longer than you think.

This was facilitated by having central control of the means of communication, education and entertainment. They could promote the ideas of communism while assuring you they were strong anti-communists.

Also, the number of times they threw the USSR a life line or ignored its obvious lying to pretend they were an equal enemy and super-dangerous leads me to believe they liked the state of balance between two powers. Either because they liked it for puddinghead reasons (without a challenge we’d go soft!) or to keep a certain amount of state control because we were “threatened.”

That was one form of the long war. The cold war, where the forces of Marxism could pick out small helpless countries one by one while at home we were told that people there had “chosen” this and that “the people” liked communism and that we were oppressors for not letting them have it.

Except the slow grind didn’t work. The truth is that Marxism is as shitty a framework for government as it was an intellectual framework for the economy. Imposing any form of Marxism — starts as communism, quickly devolves to fascism and then to a sort of feudalism — means that the society thus afflicted cannot survive. Not long term. Not economically, not mentally and definitely not morally.

Things started falling apart more and more obviously by four decades after WWII and then the USSR came thundering down not long after.

Well, all credit to Ronald Reagan, because without him the democrats would have kept propping up the rotten corpse of the USSR (let’s remember it had tried to collapse in the sixties already) like a kind of international Weekend at Bernies.

But as it started thundering down, the people here who’d become willing mind-slaves of the Marxists lost their minds, until they found two new means of attack: race and ecology. (Remember for the left race also includes your sex and who you sleep with. Because, you know, these G-d blinded idiots can’t understand CHOICE and that there are characteristics you choose and aren’t simply born with. Here, between you and me, are they clankers, or do they just think they are?)

This worked middling well until recently. Or appeared to work middling well. Let’s remember again, due to their control of the means of mass communication and indoctrination, until recently it was hard to distinguish how well it worked from how well it appeared to work. And they controlled appearances. All memorex, no reality, is a possibility for what was happening. In fact given the slow creep of means of cheating being introduced in the US since the 90s and that cheating mostly benefits the left — no? then why are they always the ones who make it possible to cheat and bitch if you try to clean up the votes? — it’s quite likely their recover scam after the USSR never worked that well.

Anyway, by the end of the 20th century it was becoming clear that despite their best efforts, they were barely holding onto the US by fraud, and that they were certainly not controlling hearts and minds. And frankly, by the late teens the rest of the world was also starting to get ideas and to rebel, though less penetrated by the internet and free association which here started breaking the spell of mass media control.

And that’s when they came up with the ultimate idea to attack the west: a human wave. Mass immigration. They figured this would for sure get their race/group communism to stick.

It wouldn’t have of course. It won’t even in Europe. But it will cause a hell of a disturbance for a few decades. And if they could do that here, maybe they could break up the US and destroy our dangerous ideas. (Really, they’ve wanted us to break up since the USSR did, because they don’t understand the differences between us and them — no seriously — and want revenge.)

Except that the collectivists drink their own ink and believe their own propaganda. They thought that say here they could swamp us with JUST people from South of the border. They might very well have thought they could swamp us with people from Mexico.

Of course they couldn’t. The population isn’t as great as they thought. And frankly, we’re very spread out. But by the end they were recruiting wholesale from anywhere in the world to throw them in here, which meant their weapon — people — lacked internal cohesion and were as likely to turn on each other as on us.

Also, of course, they don’t have control of communication. No matter how many movies they put out on the plight of the poor illegals, the people aren’t listening, and instead really would like to stop getting elbowed out of jobs by people who work for 1/4 the salary while also drawing every possible form of welfare. And they would like people to stop trying to camp on their lawn and sh*t on their sidewalk. Oh, and they’d like their children and pets to be safe.

So…. So, in the US Trump might just about have saved us from having a violent spasm that would leave a bunch of people very dead (not all them, or even most of them, just illegals) and the country in a mess (and still not give the left its triumph.)

Europe… has bigger problems. Partly because they stopped reproducing about a generation before we fell into that kind of trouble (though there are signs with the young ‘uns here and there that this might well change within ten years.) And also because most of them have been well and truly swamped by waves of immigration. And they still don’t know how to deal with any of it, because — for various cultural reasons — this type of blog, and a kind of grassroots communication is much harder to take hold there.

Frankly I’m amazed they’re managing as much of a rebellion as they are, and we wish the insurgent forces in Great Britain, still fighting to reclaim their homeland, well. I will tell them be of good cheer. If the Marxists weren’t terrified, they wouldn’t be so openly dropping the mask and showing us their hideous totalitarian faces. You are winning, but I’m afraid the victory will cost you dearly. (Salutes.)

Here? Here we are winning. We are winning magnificently. After sixty years of non-stop shrieking, indoctrination, positional-good-Marxist-display, and guilt and shame beat downs, we’re hunching our shoulders and ignoring the self-proclaimed “elites.”

Trump was elected, not because of his great achievements (sorry, Sir. We didn’t even KNOW you in 16. Now? Now we like you fine) but because of our being tired of having our legs pissed on by people who told us it was raining.

And we’ve carried on. Their magnificent coup, the most corrupt and frankly large scale bit of election fraud in the US ever, installed someone who was practically dead and while hurting us very badly never got hold of our hearts and minds, let alone made us believe they were legitimate. We went from zero to Let’s Go Brandon in minutes, it felt like.

Meanwhile everything they do turns to shit. They have become contaminated with Obama’s Mierda’s touch. They’ve lost all ability to create (I have this theory they never had it, just coasted on whatever they could steal from the few conservatives still in whatever field, but that’s harder to prove) and they can’t convince anyone. Not in the face of the dismal results of their philosophy.

Does this mean the future is guaranteed? The future is never guaranteed. And Liberty must be won day by day.

No, what it means is we have a chance. We have a chance of winning this. It might be too late for the rest of the world. (But maybe not. Salutes Great Britain’s people who are still fighting.)

But America? Well, boys and girls: it’s time to drop our shackles, ignore the Marxists and aim for the stars.

I can’t promise you we’ll make it. But I think we’re going to.

Be not afraid. Keep fighting.

The future is shining bright, and America will lead the world into it.

172 thoughts on “The Means of War”

  1. My mind read the title as “This Means War” and immediately thought of

    1. Bugs Bunny and
    2. Uh, Oh, who tripped over one of her red lines this time?

    Also, I think you’re being way too kind and understanding of Ol’ Karl.

    Liked by 4 people

  2. The idea that “diplomacy is war by other means” came to mind for some reason. 😉

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    4. Wild guess, the LLM was trained on pictures where right foot first is more commonly represented. Data bias, I’m assuming.

      Same reason LLM pictures of a clock face are always 2:10. Massive bias in the training data.

      That’s also why LLMs default to socialism. Data bias.

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      1. Yes, much; and not only training data. Same problem would occur with even real-time “search the Internet for an answer” processes — they’re sadly vulnerable to “rumor laundering” a la Chrisropher Steele, his infamous “dossier,” and all that Russia Russia Russia jazz.

        (Assemble or make up something bad-looking; shop it to “major media” outlets likely to be either friendly or credulous or both. Now when they start publishing, use the echoes of your own recent disinfo campaign to ask politicians / agencies to “just look into it, the New York Times…” This is the actual, historical playbook from Steele and Perkins Cooie (sp?) and all the rest, as many of us here will already know in detail.)

        Even “maximally truth-seeking” (cough!) “AI” LLM’s / search-and-regurgitate systems are sitting ducks for this kind of attack. Which means they’re also patsies / amplifiers for same, sigh.

        “Useful cyberidiots.”

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  4. “because it turned out the US had better arms.”

    WW2 didn’t start out that way. In 1939, the US Army was miniscule, and had a handful of WWI French tanks. The only modern service was the Navy, which was just coming out of its treaty-enforced restrictions. Not only did the US ignore the rule about fighting on two fronts, while equipping multiple other militaries (some British, some Soviet, all of the Free French, and some to China), it also designed much of its military from the ground up. This resulted in stop-gap Frankenstein-style things like the M3 Grant/Lee in the short term. But in the long-term, US equipment dominated almost every field in performance by the end of the war.

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    1. By the spring of 1945 we were building an entire Army, Navy and Air Force every month. Most of our designs were new, incorporating lessons learned the hard way on multiple battlefronts. We could have conquered the world, if we were bent that way.

      We should have listened to Patton, and wiped out the commies before we quit.

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      1. Wipe them out?

        “We”, (as in the elite western power brokers) enabled, fed and funded them from the beginning to now.

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        1. One of the more interesting things one can do on the Internet is trying to get a Russian to admit that US supplies during the war played any role at all on the Eastern Front…

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          1. According to Trent Telenko they’re crashing now. It won’t help that Ukraine is coming the main oil pipeline to Europe into Itty, bitty pieces.

            Europeans. Mouth off about wanting to “help” Ukraine but the Ukrainians need to give up another bite of territory, all the while buying Russian oil.

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              1. “Of course you realize this means war.”
                Bugs D. Bunny

                You know, I had never even thought about the coincidence of global warming becoming The Big Thing right when the USSR folded. The idea was there before, but right then…magically, somehow…as if at the flip of a switch…EVERYONE was all-in on this fringe hypothesis.

                A hypothesis is still all it is, and not a very well-supported one at that, but from day one we were all primed to accept its ridiculous catastrophism as absolute fact. Like the election fraud in 2020, there’s no way to conclusively prove it, but I’m absolutely sure the whole global warming/climate change thing is the biggest psyop the world has ever seen.

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                1. The whole ecology movement was Soviet co-opted at best.

                  And yes, when the money was followed, it was proven pretty early.

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                2. The Green Movement, yes. Global warming specifically, not as such. It started to become a thing in the ’80s (the Soviets didn’t fold until ’91). But in the ’70s, the temperature scare had been GLOBAL COOLING!!1! and the COMING ICE AGE!!1!. And apparently a decade or two earlier, there had been alarmism over global warming.

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                  1. And the officially recommended response to Global Cooling miraculously was identical to that for Global Warming/Change.

                    “Give us all the power and we’ll fix it, you peasants!”

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                    1. There’s seems to be a legitimate avenue of research in showing that whatever the hockeysticks is going on with ‘earth’ or ‘nature’, the plant cannot become stably controlled via rules or ‘rules’ implemented in human behavior.

                      Human behavior is super fuzzy.

                      The so called self proclaimed expert lunatics who are telling us that such is possible, are also verifiably making significant errors with their models of human behaviors.

                      The basic model for the loop goes 1. information is collected 2. experts act as proxies for the public, and makes policy 3. everyone else follows policy, and or waits for permission before doing anything.

                      There are some essential problems with this, that may be knowable.

                      A core problem involves basic assumptions of academia, in terms of converging on correct, and of there being positive value in multi-disciplinary borrowings between fields. Which are kinda disproven by contradiction.

                      If collective academia had the thinking properties assumed, then some of the key insights disproving or limiting the shebang would have been more frequently noticed, and much more widely distributed.

                      For example, Austrian economics in 2020 was not widely cited by academics in explaining why medical schools could not endorse shutting down the economy on thought leader Fauci’s say so. Academics now are complaining about budget cuts, or budget cut threats. This is basically itself two different disproofs by contradiction where the utility of academic conclusions are concerned.

                      Austrian economics is not a new invention, it has had time to be tested and for it to spread. The ideas which have not spread within academia are sorta an example of ‘squid farms on mars’, and are also diagnostic of selective pressures within academia that might invalidate an expectation of eventual correctness.

                      So being surprised at Trump, and thinking that Harris was good ad copy were both serious mistakes fo behavior modeling. An accurate model of how rules could be implemented in behavior would need to understand Americans to at least such a basic level.

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                3. So 1960s in the US saw a drop in US agricultural workforce.

                  Efficiency improvements.

                  Basically, at that point we were almost post-scarcity/Star Trek future.

                  Right now, we probably would have a hard time developing a true Third Reich analog, because the food scarcity was so much of that pre-existing stress, and because we are so distant from that in at least the USA.

                  This makes things like communist revolutions less likely.

                  Environmentalism looks like it is a bunch of entirely unnecesary hamrful acts, and deliberate sabotage to create some amount of uncertainty over food supply.

                  Problems with this estimate of mine: 1) I know that sentimental environmentalism exists. 2) I am weird and sentimental about very unusual interests, that are not the outdoors. 3) I estimate the market basket of thinkers in silly or incorrect ways. 4) I am projecting too much of my own perspective onto a broader group, then extrapolating from the projection.

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                  1. You’re correct about the results of enviro plans on food production. The nonsense about cow farts has been around for over a decade as an excuse to cull the cows and cut beef production. And we saw what happened a few years ago when one of the SE Asian nations agreed to go along with the instructions of one of the world international order organizations, and got hit with food shortages that year

                    I could find other examples if I were inclined to go digging.

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                    2. Well, obviously there are no termite ranchers with income that can be taxes as retaliation on that methane, so it doesn’t matter.

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                  2. “I know that sentimental environmentalism exists.”

                    I have Cowboy State Daily on my feed, telling Wyoming news, and the comments (from Wyoming-ites) whenever a potential sale of public lands is mentioned are ALWAYS extreme horror that “they’re selling our lands away from us.”

                    Now, mind you, those lands are open to hunting. So they are getting public use. But even when a curated list of public lands goes up (as in, lands that the BLM cannot easily manage and which are not anywhere accessible), the comments are always “once it’s gone, it’s going to be kept away from us.”

                    It’s interesting to watch. I should see if Nevada folk (with the most land in governmental hands) react similarly, or if they’re more apt to say About Time.

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      2. Even if the political leadership had been so inclined, the general public wouldn’t have gone along with a war against the USSR.

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    2. The U.S. built better factories, building on existing superiority, yes, but also inventing new manufacturing techniques – that oddball M3 tank, with a big gun in the hull and a smaller one in a small turret, was that way because U.S. manufacturers could not machine the turret ring large enough for a turret to hold the preferred 75 gun. So they built what they could, and at the same time invented a way to machine that large diameter bearing surface for the turret on what would be the M4 Sherman tank.

      The same improve and invent thing happened across U.S. manufacturing. The Brits licensed the Merlin V-12, and Packard took one look at the blueprints, seeing all the hand fitting and custom craftsmanship twiddling needed to make one, and set their automotive design teams to completely redesign it for mass production. The result was the Packard Merlin, reliable with interchangeable parts that did not require “file to fit” anywhere, so could be built in vast quantities.

      Manufacturing innovation and expertise won the war for the allies.

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      1. The version I’ve heard usually leads with “the Merlin was the best fighter engine of the war” and ends with “the Americans copied it and put it in the P-51 to make it a worthwhile fighter.”

        They tend to skip the whole ‘redesigned for mass production’ thing; I’ve not seen that detail before.

        Possibly because I seem to have a bias towards British history channels.

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        1. WWII US Army mechanics were gobsmacked when they discovered British Army mechanic kits heavily featured files and chisels, because those were needed to get replacement parts to fit.

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        2. Interesting note on the Merlin, Packard made a lot of them in the USA.

          I’ve always thought a V12 Merlin would be a hell of a thing to put an aluminum engine block in. Cut the weight in half.

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        4. The Engineer Guy youtube channel has an excellent example in the design of the magnetron (microwave generating tube). A very surprising manufacturing design made it possible to stamp them out in great volumes. Later, for different reasons, the change was reversed in the manufacture of magnetrons for microwave ovens.

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          1. Another example was the design of the Bailey Bridge (better, “bridging system”). The British engineer Bailey created a brilliant design: a kit for building bridges that could be assembled quickly, span decent lengths, carry the weight of a column of tanks, and be assembled from prefab parts, each of which could be carried by six or fewer men.

            The only problem: He couldn’t figure out how to make the connections in the field under rough-and-ready conditions. An American engineer solved it, and Eisenhower later named the Bailey bridge as one of the indispensible tools of Allied victory.

            Bailey bridges are still used today for temporary support of highways while the permanent bridge is being rebuilt. Next time you see one, remember its role in WWII.

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      2. The US was playing catch-up in that regard. The Germans and the Soviets had 75mm (76mm, actually, for the Soviets) guns on tanks before the war started. There had been talk of the French having S-35 tanks built in US factories (since French manufacturing was very slow), but nothing came of it. So the US tank designers and manufacturers were more or less forced to start from scratch. And as a result, a few dozen M2A4 light tanks ended up with the marines on Guadalcanal because there simply weren’t enough of the more modern tanks to go around (and the Army got first dibs).

        The navy, on the other hand…

        Anyone who tries to argue that the US Navy wasn’t top tier doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s true that the Japanese had some advantages (like the Long Lance torpedo). But the US had better battleships, better carriers, and better tactics. And before the end of the war, the naval aircraft were better too. The British had the biggest navy at the start of the war (thanks to the naval treaties), but for whatever reason they only had two battleships with 16″ guns for the duration of the war (which imo is why Bismark and Tirpitz were a genuine threat to the British battleships… but not to most of the American ones; an American fast battleship would have ripped Bismark apart in a duel, imo). They built a handful of new carriers, but operational doctrine (i.e. the British didn’t believe in storing half of the air wing above the deck) meant that they didn’t carry as many planes as the Americans did. The Soviet navy was a joke throughout the war. The Italian navy was largely obsolete. I won’t bring up the French navy. And the German navy had the handicap of trying to build ships for roles they weren’t really suited for, using ship designers who didn’t have a wealth of modern ship-building design to draw upon.

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        1. The Germans and the Soviets had 75mm (76mm, actually, for the Soviets) guns on tanks before the war started.

          Well…. no, at least not for the Germans. I think the first Russian tank with a 76 was the KV1, which was just starting to appear in 1941; the T34 wasn’t until 1942. The standard AT gun at the start of the war (1939) was the 37mm, both for tanks and artillery; and for a long time 37mm AT guns didn’t come with an HE round. The Stuart was also 37mm. That was the reason a Grant came with that 75 sponson; they needed that HE for infantry support. The PZIV had a 75, but it was a short barrel with poorer muzzle velocity than the original Sherman. What the Germans did do right is design their tanks to allow for upgunning; that PZIV turret was able to take the same long barrel 75 as the Panther, which had better sloped armor.

          Both the Germans and the British deployed 50 mm guns by 1940; the British 6 pounder was 57mm.

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          1. KVs were used in Finland (the Finns captured two of them). T34s were on the battlefield (and often failing due to mechanical problems) by late 1941.

            I never said anything about the anti-tank effectiveness of the early Mark IVs. The important thing was that they had a turret ring that supported a 75mm gun.

            It’s true that the Mark IV only had a snub 75mm in its earliest iterations. But that was fine for its intended role, as the French and British heavies ended up largely being a non-issue in the big picture (though the troops facing those tanks in the moment might disagree). Even the KVs were somewhat rare compared to the bulk of what the Germans were fighting in the USSR. It wasn’t until the T34 started arriving in numbers (and replacing all of the Soviet tanks that it had immediately made obsolete), and the German army had a collective “Oh, CRAP!” moment, that the Germans realized they needed anti-tank guns bigger than 37mm. Cue the up gunning of the Marks III and IV, followed by the Mark III hulls being moved to assault gun production when it was determined the Mark III’s turret just couldn’t hold a gun big enough for what was needed.

            Finally, keep in mind that the original intent for the 75mm gun on the M4 Sherman was a short-barreled gun that would be more effective against infantry. The gun setup on the early Mark IV tanks was actually what US tank doctrine called for when the American tooling up was going on. As happened with the Germans when the T34 arrived, the Americans suffered their own moment of chagrin when they realized that Panthers were a lot more common than they had believed, and the short-barrel 75mm gun wasn’t up to the job of dealing with them.

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            1. Well, US armor doctrine was weird, with tanks meant to support infantry by shooting pillboxes and machine gun nests and Tank Destroyers supposed to shoot at enemy tanks, somehow assuming they’d line up one to each side so the tanks could shoot left and the TDs shoot right.

              That said, the 1942 M10 TD intended to shoot at tanks had a 3 inch gun that certainly hit harder than the 75mm on the Sherman.

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              1. Yes, it was very similar to the gun that ended up on the upgunned M4s (and the M18 Hellcat).

                In fairness, the Germans originally had a similar idea. The Mark IVs were supposed to go after infantry and pillboxes, while the Mark IIIs were there for the anti-tank work. And it more or less worked until the T34 replaced all of the other medium tanks in the Soviet army, and there was simply no way to give the Mark III a big enough gun (at least until you removed the turret). So McNair wasn’t the only officer to come up with that foolish idea. It’s also worth noting that the short 75mm gun on the M4 was perfectly fine against the Mark IV. The problem was that Allied leadership thought the Mark IV was the German mainstay tank, and the Panther was only available in small numbers. The reality was that the Germans were building as many Panthers as they were Mark IVs, and the 75mm gun was wholly inadequate against the Panther.

                So, yeah. By early 1945, Ike announced that he would not accept any more shipments of short-barreled 75mm Shermans in the ETO.

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                1. the Panther was only available in small numbers

                  Well, they might have confused numbers of hulls with numbers of working Panthers; my understanding is that they had a certain defect level…..

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                  1. The early Panthers (the f model, iirc) did. They apparently even had an issue with mice chewing up the wires before Kursk.

                    On a more serious note, the problem for the Western Allies was that they simply weren’t seeing the Panther in large numbers at first. Initially most of them went to the Eastern Front, where they were needed much more badly. They didn’t turn up in Italy until Anzio in early 1944, and even then only in limited numbers. There also may have only been a handful of units with them in France at the time of the Normandy landings. So up until then, events seemed to confirm the American view.

                    This rapidly changed, though, as Western Europe suddenly shot up in importance following the landings.

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              2. Well, US armor doctrine was weird, with tanks meant to support infantry by shooting pillboxes and machine gun nests and Tank Destroyers supposed to shoot at enemy tanks, 

                That’s because they got a lot of their early armor doctrine from the British and the French, both of whom maintained that split; the British especially had heavier infantry tanks and lighter pursuit / “whippet tanks. Fuller and Liddell-Hart. There’s a series called Tanks! on Amazon Prime that examines some of this.

                https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07GJ1LKDW/ref=atv_hm_mys_c_XbosgB_4_10

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                1. On the other hand, unlike the British and French (and Germans and Soviets), the Americans never put a heavy tank into mass production during the war.

                  (despite official claims to the contrary, the Pershing was not really a heavy tank)

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                  1. I seem to remember that they had that debate and decided just to produce enough Shermans to swamp everyone rather than slow down production by retooling.

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                    1. There was also another issue, and that was a logistical one. I’ve heard that one of the reasons why it took so long to get the Pershings to Europe (iirc there were quite a few of them waiting in the States on VE Day) was because they were so much bigger than the Shermans. The logistical arrangements in the transport ships were designed with Shermans in mind, and things had to be changed up to accommodate something bigger – like the Pershing.

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                    2. I understood it was a lot due to width, as well as weight: According to the DuckDuckGo AI overlord in training an M4 Sherman was 8’7” wide at ~75k lbs, where an M26 Pershing was 11’6” wide at 96k lbs. Shipping, transporting, and just getting down the roads and across the bridges was a lot trickier in a 35” wider 20k lb heavier tank.

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        2. When the RN Pacific Fleet arrived to participate in the end of the war against Japan, British Royal Navy Illustrious-class fleet carriers could operate just over half the planes as U.S. Navy Essex-class fleet carriers because of the Illustrious’ armored flight deck/enclosed armored hangar deck.

          To keep the RN carriers CG and top weight under control given 3” of armor way up at that flight deck, the RN hangar deck was shorter and more cramped to work in. The taller open sided hanger decks on USN Essex carriers enabled warming up aircraft engines while planes were still in the hangar before bringing them up to the flight deck for launch, which sped up the launch cycle. RN planes could only start up once up on deck.

          The design differences were driven by differing philosophies as well as different experiences in different theaters of operation. The light wooden flight deck on the Essex and prior USN carriers was intended to be quick to repair, while the armored hangar deck below was supposed to stop any damage going deeper into the ship. And that RN carrier armored closed-side box was an oven in the tropical heat of the Pacific.

          But the USN calculus boiled down to by being able to launch twice as many planes the USN had better intrinsic air cover so traded armor for planes.

          Off Okinawa facing kamikaze attacks the advantages and shortcomings of each design philosophy were displayed as RN TF 57 and USN TF 58 operated carriers in the same area facing the same type of attacks.

          TF57 RN Illustrious carriers took direct hits from kamikazes on their flight decks, put out the fires, pushed the burned planes over the side, and poured quick setting concrete patches to the really big divots the explosions left in their flight deck, and were back running flight ops in hours, with tens of crew killed.

          TF 58 USN Essex carriers took kamikaze hits that went through their flight decks and set off fires among the planes below in the hangar decks, taking hours to get under control. Those ships were effectively out of the war, with hundreds killed.

          The next class of USN carriers, the Midway class, was built with armored flight decks.

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          2. Two items –

            1.) The British Implacable-class, the successor to the Illustrious-class, retained the armored flight deck but reduced the thickness of the armor.

            2.) The IJN’s Taiho was also built with an armored flight deck and an armored box for a hanger. Unfortunately, this proved to be her downfall when gas fumes got loose in the hanger as the result of a submarine’s torpedo. Attempts to clear the fumes from the ship failed, and eventually something set off the vapor, destroying her. The armored box is great when the bad things are outside the box, but becomes a problem when the bad things are inside.

            I’m not saying that the armored flight deck was a bad idea. But there were definite trade-offs.

            On an unrelated note, mention of the Taiho reminds me of the clear Japanese fantasies regarding the planned number of ships in the various classes they were building during the war. IIRC, they planned for eight Taihos. But even before the American bombing of the Home Islands, they were barely able to get one out (and it was promptly sunk). They also planned for eight Unryu-class carriers (lighter than Taiho; successors to Soryu and Hiryu), but were only able to build three of them due to a lack of needed materials. And two of them never took planes on board because there weren’t any planes to be had. The Japanese had visions of industrial production that they couldn’t have hoped to reach even at the best of times. It was pure fantasy.

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    4. We also had better, more innovative officers up and down the stack. Things like the Mk14 torpedo and bomber mafia nearly losing the air war did happen, but they happened to every power in that war. And unlike the IJA and IJN, our branches at least talked with each other at both the upper and lower levels.

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      1. We have enlisted leadership.

        And the officers were mostly smart enough to go “Hey, that worked?! Get this guy a promotion!”

        (My grandfather was Sarge to his guys until his dying day because of this; their boat flipped, and he was the only one who could swim…and knew how to keep the officer and the rest of the guys alive in water in below freezing weather. They all kept their fingers, even.)

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        1. Everybody in our military worked to win the war. When a German tank broke down, the crew called in and waited around for it to be towed back to a repair depot. When an American tank broke down, the crew got out and fixed the damn thing. Often within an hour or so. Of course, the German soldiers hadn’t spent their high-school years building and racing hot-rods for fun…

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            1. And some equality as well. There is the tale of a couple junior naval officers cutting into a long ice cream line on a ship, only to be accosted by a stentorian voice from behind telling them to get to the back of the line where they belonged. It was Admiral Halsey, standing patiently in line with the enlisted sailors.

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            2. Yeah. I don’t know how low into the ranks it went, but the German military had a large aristocratic element in it.

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              1. There was an element of “Officers Don’t Repair Machinery” in the British Military.

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          2. That also had to do with the entire Wehrmacht having it’s ideas of logistics based on operating within 500 miles (tops) of Germany, and with good road and rail nets. They literally weren’t provided with the training, tools and spares, at least initially.

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            1. Part of it was just what was available. We have visions of a highly modern German mechanized army overrunning Europe.

              The Americans had it. No American foot soldier marched. They rode in trucks.

              The British had it with American help. And a lot more of the Soviet troops had it than would otherwise have been the case without American Lend-Lease.

              The German infantry didn’t ride. They got out of their trains at the railheads, and walked the rest of the way. The only infantry who rode in vehicles were the Panzergrenadiers that were part of the Panzer divisions. After all, they couldn’t keep up with the tanks if they were on foot. And while all of the American Armored Infantry in the US Armored divisions rode in lightly armored half-tracks, the bulk of the German Panzergrenadiers rode in trucks. Only a (large) minority of the German tank infantry had half-tracks as their transport.

              So, yeah, the German logistics was a mess even before you took into account things like Russian mud, and General Winter.

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              1. To be fair, some U.S. Army infantry walked quite a bit. These were generally infantrymen who arrived at the fight by flinging themselves from reasonably serviceable aircraft.

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              2. Most german supply was by horse drawn wagon, even late in the war.

                -We- had the Red Ball Express of one way roads for trucks.

                Eisenhower was right. The weapon that won Europe:

                Deuce-and-a-half

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                1. Current Russians are allegedly using mules as supply vehicles in some areas. Of course, there are also stories stating old, poor, possibly drunk men are enlisting so when they die on the front their families will get the pension.

                  But Russia has infinite manpower and resources, so they should be allowed to keep any territory they picked up. Realpolitick, don’t y’know.

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                  1. “old, poor, possibly drunk men”

                    Russia has a couple of stats that show how miserable the populace is. One is the alcohol consumption level, which is IIRC the highest in the world. (So is the abortion rate.)

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  5. For myself, I was struck by your mention of lack of creativity. If I try to map the left onto the Unseleigh…. hm. Cruel, can copy and mock but not create, doesn’t understand humor, willing to kill cattle….

    Most of the rest of the world, sadly, has fallen into (or not yet gotten out of) a sort of soft fascism where it’s not worse, although I have hopes for Argentina if Milei can make enough changes and set up a worthy successor.

    Heck, I have hopes for a lot of places, but most of those depend on the current oligarchs of those places realizing, probably for the first time, that their peasants are people too, and investing in actually-resilient infrastructure and allowing real competition for goods and services.

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    1. Milei’s backers are prepping Argentina as an alternate Southern Hemisphere refuge to New Zealand in case the SHTF in the Middle East or the Northern Hemisphere.

      Bonus: There are no angry Maori doing the haka in Argentina.

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      1. I’ve been to New Zealand. Very pretty, nice people, civilized and speaks English. But it was already on shakey ground due to their BS freeloading “no nukes we’re too virtuous” thing NZ had against the US Navy, and Kiwiland went completely off my potential escape list when they elected Prime Minister Jacinda “Karen, I want to talk to your manager” Ahern. Yeah the new guy is better, but “PM Karen” damaged a lot of things that need to be yet fixed.

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      2. Who are they angry at? Particular people or policies, or just things in general? I do find the haka quite offputting, regardless…but I guess that’s part of the point. :)

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    2. Of all places Bolivia will have a run-off election between two not-Communists. That’s amazing. Perhaps Milei’s results are getting others to reconsider Communism.

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    3. I’ve had a lot of fun blasting the Unseelie the last little while. Turn their evil against them, snooker them into attacking a prepared position… it’s been fun.

      Best part, they asked for it. >:D

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    1. Established in 1984 by Ronald Reagan to counter and disrupt communism, coopted by Democrats (probably also in 1984) to disrupt and undermine America and freedom. It happens over and over again: Republicans talk a big game about limiting and shrinking government when the Democrats are in charge, but the second the GOP gets a chance, they’ll start creating their own government tools to fix various specific problems. Sometimes those government fix-its actually kind of do what was intended…until Democrats weasel in and weaponize the new thing against Republicans and the rest of America. Wash, Rinse, Repeat. The Republicans really are the Stupid Party, because after all this time they STILL don’t get it.

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  8. “They’ve lost all ability to create (I have this theory they never had it, just coasted on whatever they could steal from the few conservatives still in whatever field, but that’s harder to prove) and they can’t convince anyone. Not in the face of the dismal results of their philosophy.”

    That would explain the blatant, open skinsuiting of every popular property they can get their hands on now. Oh, sure, they owned some properties outright, but does anyone remember Captain Planet and the Planeteers? Turner’s attempted original superhero premise is the stuff of jokes for a reason. They can’t create on their own anything that actually has staying power.

    So they take over what works and run that into the ground. In the mid-’00s, it was Star Wars‘ Expanded Universe (now known as Legends). Yes, Lucas had a hand in that, but not all the crud in the EU was his fault even if his name got stamped on it. They hated him and wanted revenge for his breaking the malaise of the 1970s with the first billion dollar film, so once they bought the rights, they took revenge blatantly and tore the Star Wars fandom apart online. If you were in any forum or space during The Last Jedi‘s run in theaters, you might remember the cry of “you’re not a real fan, I AM” that went around as they told people who grew up on the original Star Wars that the Force was Female and finally representing girls, and it was a bunch of old, white fanbois or incels who hated the new films.

    People like me who hated TLJ, had problems with Force Awakens, and more somehow didn’t count. If you’re a Marvel fan, you’re in the middle of another such war. Same if you’re a DC fan, a Disney fan, He-Man fan, or a fan of anything decent that came out in the mid to late 20th century.

    Because they chased out the people who can create who they could hide behind. Now they’re taking over the properties those people built to try to force us to give them their due. And the answer, as before, is still a quiet: “No.”

    We’re winning. They wouldn’t be this desperate if we weren’t. It’s going to end with a lot of people hurt, so pack your first aid kit when you go out.

    But we are winning.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. You can add the Grrrrrrrlpower reboot of Ghostbusters. No, I didn’t dislike it specifically because of the characters being female. I disliked it because of the lousy writing, the bad acting, and a lot of other things. The hyper-defensive attitude of the actors and others didn’t help.

      But no, the instant the first comments about the trailers and previews appeared, it was “You’re all [whatever]ists, and [other thing]ists, and old, andstupid and Hatey McHaters. Who hate all wymyn.”

      Liked by 1 person

    2. Yes, because IP they buy is views as a venue for sockpuppeting their arrow-of-history dreck. It happened under KK at DisneyLucasfilm, it happened under Feige once he gained sole power at DisneyMarvel, and it happened when Paramount let Jar Jar Abrams and his dark acolytes get the keys to Star Trek, all sold to idiotic studio heads as appealing to “modern audiences”.

      What they found out as a result is that ”modern audiences” don’t actually exist, and in pandering to this imaginary new audience they burned their pre-existing audiences, which were the actual sole and entire value of that IP, to ashes and bones.

      The sole exception? Sony, whose license to Spider-Man let them block the worst of TehStoopid, so Spider-Man movies still make money.

      But KK Star Wars, JJ and subsequent Kurtzman Trek, and Feigephase Marvel, with extremely rare exceptions, are deservedly reviled and make no money for those IP owners.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Spiderman movies and Venom movies still make money (though the Venom movies have wrapped up at this point).

        Every *other* movie they’ve made using characters gained through the Spiderman license has been a flop.

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      2. Of course I heard the word “modern audiences” in Critical Drinker’s voice (the same one he uses for the phrase “The Message”). As you no doubt intended.

        Liked by 2 people

    3. And their purported reasoning does not even hold up. In the Star Wars extended universe they had multiple female-centric storylines, like those centered on the characters Mara Jade or Ventris, which could have been used as the basis for compelling and complex movies, where characters experience real change and growth. But nearly the first thing they did was declare all the extended universe non-canon, so they could make the Rey Palpatine dreck storyline (not a story arc because Rey-Mary-Sue never changes or develops, because she is already perfect) while “deconstructing” all the original IP characters.

      Apologies for the ongoing rant. The cultural Vandals are pretty annoying. But it is the case that they just fail and fail, so we are in fact winning, which soothes my troubled brow no end.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Good writing (and acting) could have made Rey Palpatine a worthy, compelling character. Crap writing wrecks everything.

        If she had barely survived her first fight with Kylo, escaping only because the ground broke up and he had higher-priority concerns…a hundred other better story choices, like NOT dropping gravity bombs on starships INNN SPAAACE, or running a rodeo on top of a Star Destroyer, or, or…

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      2. Disney didn’t declare the Extended Universe non-canon.

        “I don’t actually have much talent without my ex-wife and other folks fixing my cool ideas” Lucas did. Disney just announced they weren’t going to make it canon.

        Don’t remember if they’ve officially stated that one of the conditions of sale was not using the books as canon for the live action, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The prequels had too much evidence of where georgie-boy was feeling outdone because the fans liked someone else’s work more than his.

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        1. The absence of any input from Marsha Lucas in any aspect of George Lucas’s Star Wars movies after Empire is painfully clear. Her influence made the first two movies (eps 4 and 5 for you kids) the best by far.

          By the time of the prequels nobody could say “that’s dumb” to Super Genius Filmmaker George and it shows.

          I think Foxfier and I are basically roughly on the same page. George just accommodated all that Extended Universe stuff that was making money for him without being bound by any of it, while KK didn’t even deign to recognize it’s existence.

          George implicitly never felt bound by the Extended Universe stuff from which he collected fees and royalties, but he never explicitly disavowed them either. Extended Universe content was required to conform to Lucasfilm rules and be approved in detail by Lucasfilm, including authors being required to make any changes they asked for. And George mined and harvested and included various bits from them in official Lucasfilm produced mostly-canonical content like The Clone Wars seasons before the sale.

          But for George the only unalterable canon was his six movies.

          Then on October 30 2012 George Lucas signed selling Lucasfilm to Disney for $4b, with the only rumored requirement I have ever heard about being they had to keep KK on as head of the new subsidiary for some amount of time (she’d been hired by him to “co-chair” Lucasfilm in June of that same year).

          Disney subsequently made it clear George had no creative input to the new Lucasfilm.

          So George viewed the licensed EU stuff as mine-able but not strictly canonical, but KK under Disney thought otherwise. In response to various rumors and leaks during preproduction of the first sequel trilogy movie, in April 2014, almost two years ahead of the December 2015 release of The Force Awakens, Disney Lucasfilm issued a press release posted to their official Star Wars web site that said in part:

          In order to give maximum creative freedom to the filmmakers and also preserve an element of surprise and discovery for the audience, Star Wars Episodes VII-IX will not tell the same story told in the post-Return of the Jedi Expanded Universe. While the universe that readers knew is changing, it is not being discarded. Creators of new Star Wars entertainment have full access to the rich content of the Expanded Universe. For example, elements of the EU are included in Star Wars Rebels. The Inquisitor, the Imperial Security Bureau, and Sienar Fleet Systems are story elements in the new animated series, and all these ideas find their origins in roleplaying game material published in the 1980s.

          That same PR also announced the creation of the now-infamous Star Wars Story Group.

          In contrast to that official 2014 line, we do not have to guess about KK’s personal view. In a Rolling Stone interview in November 2019, asked if Star Wars movies were “a hard nut to crack”, she said (emphasis added):

          Every one of these movies is a particularly hard nut to crack. There’s no source material. We don’t have comic books. We don’t have 800-page novels. We don’t have anything other than passionate storytellers who get together and talk about what the next iteration might be.

          So to KK, and I’d assert by extension to her personally staffed Star Wars Story Group, the Extended Universe content did not exist. They’d said they were not going to follow the timeline or events of the EU, and follow it they did not, but to them it was not even content they could mine characters or plot bunnies or anything else from as they had hinted in their 2014 press release.

          It was dead to them.

          So yeah, George didn’t see the Extended Universe as canon like his movies, but KK and DisneyLucasfilm explicitly disavowed it, and by 2019 KK didn’t even recognize it’s existence.

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          1. I think Foxfier and I are basically roughly on the same page. George just accommodated all that Extended Universe stuff that was making money for him without being bound by any of it, while KK didn’t even deign to recognize it’s existence.

            Nah, I’m just offended enough by that backstabing son of a maggot to remember how he raked in money with “the books are canon,” and then then when the books got more popular, suddenly he said “oh well I never said that, ti was my production manager, and they have nothing to do with the movie universe.”

            The full copy of the magazine that I’ve linked before got removed from Archive dot com, but someone got photographs of the actual magazine:

            http://weblog.st-v-sw.net/2005/09/

            Liked by 1 person

          2. First response in moderation, but here’s a quote and link for an idea of how very clearly Lucas decanonized the books that he raked in money selling as officially approved canon:

            In a 2003 interview, George Lucas clarified that “I’ve not read any” Expanded Universe stories and that “I told them when they started writing I wouldn’t read any of them.” In fact, his most intimate involvement with these fan-favorite tales is telling the assorted writers what not to do. “I blocked out certain periods [they couldn’t touch where the real story happens].”

            Across various interviews with George Lucas, his most consistent claim about the Expanded Universe was that it simply took place in a different world than his own. He told Cinescape in 2002, “There are two worlds here…my world, which is the movies, and there’s this other world that has been created, which I say is the parallel universe — the licensing world of the books, games and comic books.”

            That same year, he was asked whether he supervised the various EU stories and replied ”You know, I try not to think about that” and “I have my own world in movies and I follow it.”

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    5. “…does anyone remember Captain Planet and the Planeteers?”

      Yes, and I’ve been seeing a lot of it the last ten years. Of note this week in this regard, somebody released a study of sorts claiming that Hollyweird has stopped making comedy. Like, stopped. As if they can’t do it anymore.

      Also I’ve just finished watching a few YouTubes about the three Marvel movies this year, none of which I have watched. Nerdrotic was particulary savage. He’s an original comic book nerd from the old days and confirmed the wisdom of my decision to not be trapped in a theater watching any of them. Fantastic Four, the battle with Galactus reduced to a Susan Richards girlboss moment? Silver Surfer is a chick? (And not even a good looking one!) Yeah, glad I save my money.

      There’s a quote I heard somewhere, might have been Jay Leno who said it, you can’t be creative when you have hate in your heart. And that’s where they are. Spitting hatred, and calling it creativity.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I sorta liked Captain Planet, but I am not sure if this included any period where I took it serious and at face value.

        One, it is kinda a distillation of more than one story telling style then in frequent use. International travel team from different countries. etc.

        Two, it was not that much objectively worse than other cartoon shows on for similar times and broadcast channels.

        So if there were three or four hours of saturday morning programming (1), there might be one or two well written adn executed shows at any given time, but Captain Planet was probably not running against those. Captain Planet was probably bottom quartile, and probably only competing against the third and fourth quartiles. It was solid enough compared to the worst of the fourth quartile.

        (1) excluding waking up really early for stuff like farm reports, or continuing on to watch something non-cartoony later on PBS like construction.

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      2. Humor (and particularly comedy) implies the ability to make fun of yourself. Leftists don’t have that any longer, if they ever did. They have to take themselves seriously or their whole worldview will crumble.

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  9. Everything after the original movie is a hallucination.

    Start over with a reshoot of the first script, then Empire without the creepy bro/sis crap. Ben killed Anakin, Vader’s would-be apprentice. Etc.

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    1. No bro/sis in Empire – the big reveal was Darth Daddy.

      That was an unforced error in RoTJ making Leia Luke’s sister, and kill all tension in the Han-Luke-Leia bad-boy vs good-guy “I like nice men” triangle.

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      2. Which also caused Alan Dean Foster to become the first author who wrote outside the movie timeline to have his work recalled, since his “Splinter of The Mind’s Eye” had the Luke-Leia pairing as a subplot element.

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      1. Everything the the prequel trilogy can be binned.I like Ewan McGregor’s performance as Obi Wan and that’s it.

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        1. I have a very ‘depends on the fanfic’ view of canon.

          I still read fanfic of Star Wars, and I am a little willing to let someone try to make a silk purse of a sow’s ear.

          And the insomnia has impaired my thinking enough to ‘would it not be cool’ for an original that is basically Captain Planet and Star Wars. Captain Planet without the environmentalism, and SG1/Star Gate Infinity or Star Wars with America somehow in transport range.

          Liked by 1 person

        2. I watched The Phantom Menace in the theater, and while I have the other two on DVD, both have been watched as a couple of realtime clips, but mostly at 2X. Never had any inclination for episodes 7 onward.

          I stopped caring about ST movies after First Contact and in general, SF as done by Hollywood. Not having a theater close by (it’s an hour each way travel time), and the DVD content proving Sturgeon’s Law, I’m just reluctant to spend time watching movies. OTOH, there are a couple on the TBW list. Hard to make time at home ($SPOUSE doesn’t like SF/Fantasy), but my Medford trips can work. Depends on how badly my eyes are screwed up after the doc does his checkup scans. I’ve got Serenity/Firefly and Return of the King on the list. Have to flip a coin.

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          1. Streaming has some good things. KPop Demon Hunters (exactly what it says on the tin) was amazingly good—and I found out today that Sony “let go” pretty much the whole crew after it wrapped, because they didn’t like working with the creators and figured it was going to be a flash in the pan.

            Three of the eight songs of the film are in the top 10 on Spotify, and the rest are in the top 25 IIRC.

            I’ve also noticed that while the principal hero characters have costumes, some of the other obvious ones don’t, like Derpy Tiger. (Seriously. All the costume links are for custom at the moment.) Or even Korean gat to pair with long black robes, which you’d think would be an obvious way to make money.

            So—runaway hit, while the merch department falls flat on their faces. Sounds familiar.

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          2. Personally, I don’t want Serenity to be canon and if I had my way it would be Return of the King. But that’s just me. Serenity does wrap up some plot threads and does them well.

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  10. Re the self-preening elites thinking of themselves as clankers … I would imagine that would not appeal to them due to the lack of wine, yachting, perverted sex, and other amenities they enjoy. I do wonder whether they read Dune in their teens and now imagine themselves as more “culturally sophisticated” mentats.

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  11. I am wondering now, how much good, interesting and wonderful creativity in books, movies, TV, magazines, etc will be created out of the wreckage that the wokists have made of long-established media of all sorts. There was a thread on Neo a couple of days ago, about that awful, bigoted black child of privilege working as a writer for the New Yorker, and a lot of the commenters noted with regret how they used to read that magazine — as well as a host of others of the same intellectual level — but those publications began to turn proggie, and so we let subscriptions lapse, watched other stuff … and now so many of those media outlets are failing. I have had that experience, and so have so many others of a moderate, or conservative, or even classically liberal background – I’ve been reading their laments over stuff they used to read-watch-listen to-participate in ever since the internet and blogging was the hot new thing.

    Old established media, like the New Yorker, have essentially chased away a large portion of a long-time audience, over decades – and so what happens now? Eventually, their appeal becomes so selective that they aren’t profitable or respected any more by the general public. They go under, cease to exist, join the choir invisible … and I think we are coming close to the point where new media begins to blossom to replace the old, proggie-corrupted and destroyed

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      1. I really-really-REALLY want to see the Darkship series as a movie trilogy and the MHI universe turned into a big, long TV series with all the bells and whistles.

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          1. And Larry has actually given some thought to how scary it would be to fight someone with teleportation powers, even short-range ones. ESPECIALLY if she can grab you by the lapels and bamf you somewhere along with her, then immediately let go and bamf away leaving you atop a high ledge/about to fall into the ocean/about to fall two thousand feet onto concrete/in a room full of poison gas/in front of the guns of your buddies who are hosing the area down trying to shoot her.

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              1. My mental picture of how teleportation works (that it’s like opening a wormhole and stepping through) wouldn’t allow ending up inside a solid object (has to be air that you can displace, or vacuum if you’re able to get high up enough), and ending up inside liquids is questionable which is why I had “about to fall into the ocean” rather than “a thousand fathoms deep” in my list. But if the teleportation ability is “swap what’s here with what’s there” then there could suddenly be a granite statue (of the teleporter holding you by the lapels) where you used to be, then you find yourself completely surrounded by stone, with a suddenly-hollow space in the shape of the teleporter who’s just killed you (and teleported away before she, too, dies of suffocation).

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                1. In the books, one of the commonest ways for an inexperienced Traveler to die was by teleporting into space already occupied by a solid object. Faye got a beetle embedded in her foot during the attack on the Vierra farm. Air doesn’t cause such issues. Why? Don’t know. Traveling would be an utterly useless Talent if air were a problem, so by authorial fiat it’s not.

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          2. John Van Stry had a bit on his substack about a TV deal that crashed and burned because the SFX budget would have been way over the top. MHI might be OK, but Grimnoir would be a challenge, unless CGI/AI is more affordable nowadays.

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      2. As if *that’s* ever stopped a would-be script writer…

        There’s a widely held view among lefties who play video games that the Fallout video game franchise (which the TV series is based off of) is a critique of capitalism. The creator of the franchise has come out and *explicitly* rejected this view, stating that the franchise is about war. To back his view, he’s pointed to the voice-over that opens each game:

        “War. War never changes.”

        Last I’d heard, bringing this up on the Fallout Reddit will get you banned.

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  13. “Yes, yes, constitutional monarchy is better. And also depending on the quality of the king, yadda yadda, except that you can’t guarantee the quality of the king …”

    The Christian doctrine of the millennium is widely debated and there is no consensus among the various branches of Christianity about what it means, but one interpretation is that Jesus will return to Earth and literally reign as king for a thousand years. (I don’t know how the Catholics understand the millennium (and I’d be interested to hear the details if Foxfier or others want to explain it), but “Jesus will literally rule as king on Earth after His return” is one of the most common interpretations among the Protestant groups that teach Biblical inerrancy — evangelicals, Baptists, and so on — so this isn’t some fringe doctrine believed only by a few hundred people).

    Which is why I’ve often said “The best possible political system is an absolute monarchy with a perfect king, who knows everything and will judge fairly and accurately. And who also will not die and leave the throne to a venal, corruptible son. But the worst possible political system is an absolute monarchy with a less-than-perfect king, who can be bribed or even just plain judge with necessarily incomplete knowledge.” (Well, I’ve often said things that are a summary of that, I don’t usually use all those words).

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    1. I woke up this morning realizing we’re in an Old Testament scenario, namely what happened when Rehoboam succeeded Solomon. Schumer, Pelosi, etc, are for darn sure not as wise as Solomon, but they have placed great burdens on the American people and have at least a few tired, worn brain cells amongst them. AOC, Mamdani, the really scary fellow running for mayor in Minneapolis (just look at the guy. Whites of his eyes showing all around, all the time), are Rehoboam, and they’re going to be just like him if they ever get to power.

      In the OT, Solomon’s advisors told Rehoboam to loosen some of the restrictions and lower the tax burden. Rehoboam’s peers told him to double down. So the common folk got, “You say my father punished you with whips? I will do it with scorpions! My burdens will make my father’s burdens look light!”

      And shortly thereafter, Rehoboam was running for his life into Judea and the combined ,kingdoms were a memory.

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  14. Because of this, I am now expecting a silly “Memes of War” weekend post. Now you’ve got that thought rolling around in your head, too. Because that’s what I first read.

    Also, the war of the commiescum is, to my eyes, only one front of a global and long, long lasting war between civilization and barbarism. That one’s got a good few millennia on the clock with more yet to go like as not. Civilization is exists to uplift humanity from the hell of barbarism. The world where it’s neighbor against neighbor, brother against brother, and the Big Man above it all, profiting from the suffering labor of others.

    Civilization is where there is the expectation that even the powerful can (or at least, they bloody well should) burn should they trespass against the law. Where there are rules, not constant shifting that leads to little, if any certainty. Civilization is the bedrock upon which we build a life. Stability, coupled with measured risk, is growth.

    The uncivilized barbarian would rather rule upon squalor and filth than strive in the world of civilization. He would be too happy to. He does not seek equals, but serfs. Not stability, but targets for plunder and rape. Civilization is for the weak, says the uncivilized barbarian.

    In a way, he is right. The weak can survive under civilization, where they are more often than not killed elsewhere. But the weak can become strong, too, in a civilized world. Not often so, otherwise.

    Seek civilization, friends. Learn its ways and mores. Become Americans, those of you reading this that are not yet so. If your heart yearns for freedom, we welcome you. Learn our history- it’s pretty great. Our culture and dialects. Become what you are meant to be.

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    1. But the weak can become strong, too, in a civilized world.

      And when even the weak among you can become strong, then your society has more strength at its disposal than any barbarian horde can muster. In the end, the barbarians are doomed. So they can join us…or die. (Really, join us, please; civilization is a club that’s open to anyone who wants to work at it, and we’d love to have you with us.)

      Liked by 1 person

  15. Note that the censorship campaign that was disrupted when Musk bought Twitter has continued.

    Three prongs that I’m aware of; there’s the censorship laws coming out of the UK, EU (with a side of anti-privacy,) Australia, Canada, and even introduced into Congress.

    There’s the debanking from MasterCard, Visa, and other payment processors. They’ve destroyed a manga archive/shop, Manga Library Z, and forced Niconico (a Japanese YouTube-a-like) and Steam to rewrite their terms of service, and further banned Steam from accepting currencies aside from US, Canadian, and Australian dollars, British pounds, Japanese yen, or Euros.

    The payment processors are bouncing between using the ‘reputational risk’ thing that was introduced, if I understand correctly, by Operation Chokepoint, and pointing at their own terms of service that, if taken literally, would preclude most dramas, much less any depiction of violence. Meanwhile, Visa and MasterCard not only facilitate any and all transactions with Roblox, but are actually partners. Roblox has been notorious in gamer circles as a haven for pedophiles for most of a decade (first big, well-known example dates back to 2018) and this past week has added new heat to that fire.

    (There’s a group of Australian busy bodies that have claimed credit for Steam’s terms of service edit, but my belief is that is just clout-chasing, though they may themselves believe. I think the payment processors wanted to do that, and Collective Shout was, at most, a convenient excuse. They’re fairly well connected to the Australian government, but not that well connected. Probably.)

    The final active censor threat that I’m aware of is Cloudflare, and they’ve been slowly expanding who they’ve been denying service to, with their most recent victims the Gelbooru and Danbooru image boards. (Yes, they started with The Daily Stormer, but to me that says more about choosing their targets carefully in a bid to normalize the move rather than any real attempt at virtue.)

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    1. Oh, cloudflare has been horrible for a while; they were the threat I first became aware of. And VPNs are not as much help as everyone would like to think.

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      1. If you have trustworthy friends in other countries whom you visit from time to time, you can roll out your own VPN by buying a Raspberry Pi box for $35, plus an extra $35 or so for a case, power supply, and micro SD card. Then install Linux on it and set up Tailscale, which allows you to set any device in your Tailscale network as an “Internet exit node” for as long or short a time as you want. (And if you don’t want to trust Tailscale the company, there’s an open-source implementation called Headscale that you can run yourself). Result is a VPN whose IP address isn’t on anybody’s block lists, because it’s not from one of the commercial VPN networks whose IP ranges are public knowledge. instead, to Netflix/Spotify/whatever it just looks like you’re at your friend’s house using their Wifi. (Which you are, but privately through a custom VPN from a thousand miles away).

        I’ve done this and it works. Youtube won’t show me a certain video because “The owner hasn’t licensed this content for your region”? A couple clicks and now I’m coming from a US-based IP address — and an IP address that belongs to a US-based ISP, not a commercial VPN.

        Sure, if anyone was actively hunting for me then that wouldn’t protect me: they’d be able to tell that the IP address belonged to John Smith or Mike Jones or Dave Brown, and it wouldn’t be hard to figure out what common acquaintance John and Mike and Dave have in common. But for basic “You can’t access this because you’re in the wrong country” blocks? Neat end-run around those which doesn’t trigger anyone’s “this request is coming from a known VPN” red flags.

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        1. Then install Linux on it and set up Tailscale, which allows you to set any device in your Tailscale network as an “Internet exit node” for as long or short a time as you want. (And if you don’t want to trust Tailscale the company, there’s an open-source implementation called Headscale that you can run yourself). Result is a VPN whose IP address isn’t on anybody’s block lists, because it’s not from one of the commercial VPN networks whose IP ranges are public knowledge.

          Thanks, Robin; I was not aware of Tailscale. Can “your friend” detect that you’re doing this if he (or your friendly neighborhood Fred who’s on your system (of course with a warrant! what kind of Good Guy do you think Fred is?!?)) happens to scan his system as the admin?

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          1. Tailscale wrote about this recently on their blog. They said that while they can’t read the data you’re sending between your computers, they can know that your computer A is sending data to computer B (in fact, it’s unavoidable for them to know this due to the need for the control server to broker the connection between the two machines before they start sending data). That’s why some people choose to run Headscale, so that no data, not even connection data, goes through someone else’s computer. (And even then, No Such Agency would be able to see that IP address A is sending lots of encrypted UDP packets to IP address B, and would have a pretty easy time figuring out what all your IP addresses are.)

            And yes, the friend whose network you’ve put the Raspberry Pi computer on would be able to see traffic flowing in and out, though he wouldn’t be able to snoop on the traffic unless there’s a flaw in Wireguard he can exploit. (And Wireguard is so widely used that any flaw, if publicly revealed, would get LOTS of people writing about it in LOTS of fora). So if you were to, say, plug a Raspberry Pi box into a janitor’s closet at a library, it would be found and removed within days if their network admins are competent. (It might last for months if they’re not, but it someone competent would eventually be on the network and notice the greatly increased number of UDP packets.)

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      1. Also, if we’re going to wait till no child is ever abused, we’re in the “if only everyone” scenario. And not only hasn’t everyone ever only anything, but it’s unlikely everyone ever will.

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  17. Since we’ve hijacked the comments into WWII military topics, I thought I’d hijack a bit further: One of the observations I occasionally have read is what I call “The IBM Myth”, About how WWII vets came back impressed with how working together seamlessly under orders from a unified command they could achieve anything, so they built top-down rigid companies like IBM using that centrally directed methodology and invented the modern world.

    The issue I have with that is I’ve been lucky enough to talk with a few WWII veterans, and every single one of them tells stories not of “Working together towards a common goal, comrade…err, shipmate!” but instead the stories that lie behind the acronym “FUBAR” – how the only way we won the war was by ignoring and working around the idiotic orders from higher that didn’t make a lick of sense, how going around the official system to get what was needed to where it was needed was the rule, and making things that needed to happen happen using individual initiative. And also by stealing jeeps. How they were shipped winter gear in the tropical Pacific, or never got winter boots in the ETO until the summer of 1945, but did notice all the great warm winter gear that the rear area supply types had around the time of the Battle of the Bulge, but made things work and got it done so they could go home.

    I have heard the same themes talking with Korean War and Vietnam war veterans, as well as Cold War vets who built or manned the DEW line stations or fixed the electrical systems in the missile fields. And there’s a degree of recognition on the theme in the literature:

    “The reason the U.S. Navy does so well in wartime is that war is chaos, and the U.S. Navy practices chaos on a daily basis.”

    The quotation comes from an unnamed (and quite possibly apocryphal) German officer from World War II. A companion observation, from a (probably just as apocryphal) Soviet author of Cold War vintage:

    “A serious problem in planning against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine.”
    https://thediplomat.com/2013/09/unorthodox-and-chaotic-how-america-should-fight-wars/

    The interesting thing to me here in Silicon Valley is that both of these are present here – IBM had hard drive manufacturing here at one point, and still has a major research center back in the hills to the south, and then there are all the startups that made this place famous. IBM’s way held sway as the valleys started to grow, but a lot of the people who founded the more free wheeling startups were ex-IBM, and didn’t like that way at all, seeing creativity stifled as a business negative.

    As that linked article notes, it’s tough to reduce things to a sound bite, and with more words things get more complex. But I think there is a thrives-in-chaos strain that underlies the American character. And I think that is not a bad thing at all.

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    1. “Scrounging” is, I believe, the term often used to refer to how the front-line guys get hold of stuff that doesn’t exactly appear on their Table of Organization. Or how guys who spend a lot of time in the advance areas find supplements for their field rations when they get the opportunity to pull in for a day or two at a base.

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  18. The company I work for went out of business. While applying for unemployment, one of the questions asked if a disaster was the cause. Unfortunately, there was no option to declare that the Kalifornia state government is a disaster for any small business. :-(

    Anyway, looks like I’m retired now. Oh well.

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    1. What no “Disaster type labeled ‘Other: _________”? Where you can fill in “California State small Business regulations”? Asking for a friend.

      Should I say sorry, congratulations on retiring, or welcome to the next career that does not depend on income?

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  19. There were reasons why the USSR had so much good press. A lot of people desperately wanted to believe in socialism, particularly after WWI seemed to have discredited the old ways completely. Also, the people who went there were tightly corralled and herded around and only shown things that looked impressive—and very few, if any, of them, spoke Russian (at that time, Russian was not widely studied outside of the USSR itself.) They were dependent on their guides, and if, for example, when they asked (through their guide/interpreter) what a worker had had for breakfast, they had no way of knowing that, instead of the guide’s “translation,” the worker had said “You should know we never get any breakfast.”

    When I was in the “People’s” “Republic” of “China,” a few years after Mao died, I noticed that our group was watched pretty closely by our guides. A lot of us did speak Chinese, and I think they were afraid that we’d get too curious and ask too many questions and get answers that didn’t make China look good.

    Hitler’s Germany had no such advantages. Foreigners were about as free to roam around as they were in other European countries, and a lot of foreigners could speak German—and many Germans also knew foreign languages. So the bad stuff was very hard for the Nazis to hide.

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      1. Apparently I have absolutely no tolerances left this morning, because the best reaction I have to that is “Fly them out and drop them somewhere in the middle of Africa. Parachutes optional.”

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        1. I will believe we have won when no court will even entertain such a suit.

          “No. Take your nonsense and go away.”

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    1. I am not yet sane enough today to have a concise sound thought. (I am doing a taper on caffeine for a test.)

      Anyway, before I read the essay yesterday, I was expecting something about stats and about theoretical models.

      I’m certainly open to jokes about lots and lots and lots of statistical moments.

      There’s a school of thought that Robert McNamera did nothing wrong. I think that the only people who can belong to that school of thought must also be wrong in a lot of the same ways. As an early generation stats wonk in government, he is a pretty key part of the historical context to the modern technocratic lunatics, and to their influences on government and on policy.

      The basic situation right now, will in hindsight deserve a retrospective involving a lot of examination of statistical ideas, and of the ways people led themselves to think.

      Which is to say, it was maybe foreseeable, but I am only now using present sight to see the need in the future for a real complete examination of hindsight.

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  22. Yes, long term, we are winning. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/us/politics/democratic-party-voter-registration-crisis.html

    The most effective method is continuing to exist, while the progressives seek a sterile utopia. Although they claim that religion is outdated, they themselves are in the grips of religious beliefs, which it is heresy to criticize. Trans ideology, and abortion as a sacrament, restrict organic growth. I would have thought they might learn from the example of the Shakers, who now have three (3) members, according to Wikipedia.

    I do not know how the Democrats get out of this mess. The older members seem to be terrified of their younger members. If by some miracle, they manage to stop taking the 20% side on issues like the Bill of Rights, that would also be a victory for our side.

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    1. No. If Democrats get into power by paying lip service to ‘populist’ issues (as opposed to ‘unpoulist’ issues?) they will instantly revert to their elitist authoritarian nature.

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      1. I agree caution is warranted. They have a long history of saying one thing to get elected, then totally dropping the positions after the election. That leads to the bizarre expectation that every politician does this, and thus the outright shock when Trump started delivering on his promises.

        However, there is a difference between a Zell Miller and an AOC. Some of the most effective Republican appointees and politicians were once Democrats. None of us benefit from the Democratic party becoming outright Communists.

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  23. https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/warmington-sleeping-man-who-allegedly-defended-himself-against-intruder-faces-charges

    Just thought I’d throw this one into the shark pool today, a man sleeping in his own bed in his own apartment was woken by an -armed- intruder seeking to burgle him at 3AM a couple nights ago. Mr. HamBurglar (who is not named, at this point) went to the hospital with “serious injuries.” One speculates HamBurglar took a Louisville Slugger to the cranium but we have no details.

    Now y’all know the song I keep singing here, that Canada has no right to defense of life or liberty, and less than no right to defense of property? You let them burn your house and barn down without lifting a finger, right? I keep saying it and saying it? Gets annoying after a while, doesn’t it? Well see if you can guess what happened here.

    TL/DR, yes, the sleeping man attacked in his own bed is charged with “aggravated assault” which is a charge under Canadian law with a 14 year maximum sentence AND a judge cannot issue a “conditional” sentence where he gets a slap on the wrist, and they charged him with “assault with a weapon” which could be anything from a sword or battle mace to a wooden spoon or a pencil. Also a serious charge, also major jail time.

    Uh huh. They charged him with a possible 14 years in the slammer for winning a fight against an armed man who went at him when he was sleeping.

    We know Mr. HamBurglar was armed because they charged him with “possession of a weapon for dangerous purpose.” Here’s what the article says:

    “The 41-year-old Lindsay man who was already wanted by police at the time of the incident for un-related offences and has since been charged with possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose, break, enter and theft, mischief Under $5,000 and failing to comply with probation.“

    Yep. He’s armed, he’s out on bail for doing other serious stuff already, the cops are after him already, he’s broken into a man’s apartment to do who-knows-what… and they charge the victim.

    Okay? That’s how it is in Canada. This is not a fluke, this is how they do it here.

    There are a bunch of cases currently being litigated before the courts right now, that have been going on for a couple years already. Imagine the state of these people, charged with serious crimes because of home invasions, don’t know what’s going to happen, dragged down by paying for lawyers, and one guy, Peter Khill, an army veteran no less, got sent to jail for 8 years because he shot a car thief in his driveway in the dark. A sentence now under investigation because it was a year longer than it was supposed to be, and because they tried him THREE TIMES before they got the outcome they wanted.

    So yeah. Sh1t’s going down in Canaduh. I don’t see how we let this go on much longer.

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  24. This was facilitated by having central control of the means of communication, education and entertainment. They could promote the ideas of communism while assuring you they were strong anti-communists

    One of the more interesting things about the recent “push” to deploy widely-usable, widely-used “artificial intelligence” (and especially with/as what you could call Branded Big AI), is how it seems to be aiming (intentionally or not, wittingly or not) to centralize, or re-centralize, assorted things that at the moment have little or no “center” or “centralization” to even possibly exploit.

    Search engines are more an oligopoly product than a free market commodity, but those (relatively) few are fiercely competitive. Encylopedia companies were never hugely numerous, either, but there were more than a few of them — and it’s gotten less central, not more, these Internet days. (Yes, sure, Wikipedia is the first word on many things for a lot of us. But the last word, where the quality of the answer is important to you, on how many?)

    Illustration, for instance, never really had a “chokepoint” before (assuming you couldn’t either do the job adequately yourself, or could afford to hire the drawing done). Now, almost anyone can get one done, likely even fast and cheap; if you have the cheap access and the “promptometry” down, and the machine isn’t in an ornery mood or just balking or shying (for more see tomorrow’s OP).

    And how real is the possibility we’re about to raise a generation that literally can’t draw even a simple picture without access to Grok Imagine or whatever? How much is it worth to a company to literally see (in real time) even a quarter or a half of what the country’s kids are currently ‘drawing’ — when such a capability used to be far “beyond the dreams of avarice” not long ago.

    Similarly for self-driving cars; what happens to the children of the “Tesla Generation” when it’s time for them to learn how to drive and get their licenses, no automatics involved? Or, not?

    Programming, at least the “just so it mostly works” sort. Maybe even the “mission critical” sort, where managers become bedazzled, stingy, out-of-touch enough to cut actual people far enough out of the loop.

    (Yes, all this rightly ought to be a whole article or a guest-post; but here’s at least an appetizer.)

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    1. aiming (intentionally or not, wittingly or not) to centralize, or re-centralize, assorted things that at the moment have little or no “center” or “centralization” to even possibly exploit.

      Cloud was the first step; AI is the second. The goal is to have one well of poisoned data everyone’s AI drinks from.

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        1. The idea that those are mutually exclusive is equally ludicrous. Example: COVID. Lots of boodle for folks who wanted an excuse to ruin things.

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          1. That will be interesting news to the compute service companies, that they haven’t been making money hand over fist at all despite running continuous building projects for years.

            The most you can reasonably argue for is that someone came through a few lightyears behind the shock front and thought “hey this might be useful!” without having any understand of what or how.

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            1. I think the most annoying thing about the current shriekfest about AI is now many people can and/or will not comprehend how much demand there is for compute.

              They are sitting at home with their 160k (because they aren’t some megacorp which would need a whole 640k), declaring that obviously no one could possibly have any need for any datacenters.

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    3. And how real is the possibility we’re about to raise a generation that literally can’t draw even a simple picture without access to Grok Imagine or whatever? 

      Less than zero.

      And I say less than because I’ve watched too many people get back into drawing, and try to improve, almost right outputs.

      With an AI, I can get some kind of a result and figure out what the look I want is, though it’s far beyond my abilities.

      (Which are the sort that made multiple art teachers throw their hands in the air and quit even trying.)

      Liked by 1 person

    4. is how it seems to be aiming (intentionally or not, wittingly or not) to centralize, or re-centralize, assorted things that at the moment have little or no “center” or “centralization” to even possibly exploit.

      Yeah that’s not going to work. If that’s their goal any hope of achieving it was blown out shortly after Trump took office and torpedoed the restrictions on compute and usage that the Yudowskians were trying to get implemented.

      As for the rest…….. sorry, but that ship sailed almost 200 years ago with the invention of the camera. And we’ve heard all of this doom-speak before, many, many, many, times. Not buying it this time either.

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  25. one well of poisoned data everyone’s AI drinks from

    Jerry Pournelle’s “CoDominium” used this technique to help suppress non-approved science and technology; while “Licensed Scientists” working on government or government-approved research had access to the real stuff, non-licensed scientists and engineers usually had to use the Net’s information; which was often wildly wrong, incorrect even to the values of fundamental constants.

    If you can’t stop the signal (or won’t, for cost-benefit reasons), drown it in noise.

    There’s even a name for this now, GIGO GRAR.

    Garbage In, Garbage Out,

    Garbage Round and Round.

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  26. I saw that the New Deal was only superficially a reform movement. I had to acknowledge the truth of what its more forthright protagonists, sometimes unwarily, sometimes defiantly, averred: the New Deal was a genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation. It was not a revolution by violence. It was a revolution by bookkeeping and lawmaking. In so far as it was successful, the power of politics had replaced the power of business. This is the basic power shift of all the revolutions of our time. This shift was the revolution. It was only of incidental interest that the revolution was incomplete, that it was made not by tanks and machine guns, but by acts of Congress and decisions of the Supreme Court, or that many of the revolutionists did not know what they were or denied it. But revolution is always an affair of force, whatever the force disguises itself in. Whether the revolutionists prefer to call themselves Fabians, who seek power by the inevitability of gradualism, or Bolsheviks, who seek power by the dictatorship of the proletariat, the struggle is for power.

    Now I thought that I understood much better something that in the past had vaguely nibbled at my mind, but never nibbled to a conclusion — namely, how it happened that so many concealed Communists were clustered in Government, and how it was possible for them to operate so freely with so little fear of detection. For as between revolutionists who only half know what they are doing and revolutionists who know exactly what they are doing the latter are in a superb maneuvering position.

    At the basic point of the revolution — the shift of power from business to government — the two kinds of revolutionists were at one; and they shared many other views and hopes. Thus men who sincerely abhorred the word Communism, in the pursuit of common ends found that they were unable to distinguish Communists from themselves, except that it was the Communists who were likely to be most forthright and most dedicated in the common cause. For men who could not see that what they firmly believed was liberalism added up to socialism could scarcely be expected to see what added up to Communism. Any charge of Communism enraged them precisely because they could not grasp the differences between themselves and those against whom it was made.

    - Whittaker Chambers

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