Tag: history

Last Chance at Landmark

A selection from The History of the Pelopponesian War by Thucydides, the Landmark edition of which is the first in the Castalia History series. From now until Friday, new subscribers will be subscribed from the first book, after which new subscriptions will begin with the second book in the History series, which will be announced on July 1st.

Due to the enthusiasm for the series, the print run for The Landmark Thucydides will be 500.

So bloody was the march of the revolution, and the impression which it made was the greater as it was one of the first to occur. Later on, one may say, the whole Hellenic world was convulsed; struggles being every, where made by the popular chiefs to bring in the Athenians, and by the oligarchs to introduce the Lacedaemonians. In peace there would have been neither the pretext nor the wish to make such an invitation; but in war, with an alliance always at the command of either faction for the hurt of their adversaries and their own corresponding advantage, opportunities for bringing in the foreigner were never wanting to the revolutionary parties. The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases. In peace and prosperity, states and individuals have better sentiments, because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes. Revolution thus ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, from having heard what had been done before, carried to a still greater excess the refinement of their inventions, as manifested in the cunning of their enterprises and the atrocity of their reprisals. Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting, a justifiable means of self-defence. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In fine, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was wanting, was equally commended until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations had not in view the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition for their overthrow; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime. The fair proposals of an adversary were met with jealous precautions by the stronger of the two, and not with a generous confidence. Revenge also was held of more account than self-preservation. Oaths of reconciliation, being only proffered on either side to meet an immediate difficulty, only held good so long as no other weapon was at hand; but when opportunity offered, he who first ventured to seize it and to take his enemy off his guard, thought this perfidious vengeance sweeter than an open one, since, considerations of safety apart, success by treachery won him the palm of superior intelligence. Indeed it is generally the case that men are readier to call rogues clever than simpletons honest, and are as ashamed of being the second as they are proud of being the first. The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention. The leaders in the cities, each provided with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of political equality of the people, on the other of a moderate aristocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish, and, recoiling from no means in their struggles for ascendancy engaged in the direst excesses; in their acts of vengeance they went to even greater lengths, not stopping at what justice or the good of the state demanded, but making the party caprice of the moment their only standard, and invoking with equal readiness the condemnation of an unjust verdict or the authority of the strong arm to glut the animosities of the hour. Thus religion was in honour with neither party; but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape.

Thus every form of iniquity took root in the Hellenic countries by reason of the troubles. The ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow. To put an end to this, there was neither promise to be depended upon, nor oath that could command respect; but all parties dwelling rather in their calculation upon the hopelessness of a permanent state of things, were more intent upon self-defence than capable of confidence. In this contest the blunter wits were most successful. Apprehensive of their own deficiencies and of the cleverness of their antagonists, they feared to be worsted in debate and to be surprised by the combinations of their more versatile opponents, and so at once boldly had recourse to action: while their adversaries, arrogantly thinking that they should know in time, and that it was unnecessary to secure by action what policy afforded, often fell victims to their want of precaution.

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Alarm Bells

The great Martin van Creveld doesn’t like some of the historical patterns he has noticed are starting to play out:

In the Middle East, the alarms bells are ringing. There are several reasons for this, all of them important and all well-able to combine with each other and give birth to the largest conflagration the region has witnessed in decades. The first is the imminent demise of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, alias Abu Maazen. Now 88 years old, his rule started in 2005 when he took over from Yasser Arafat. Unlike Arafat, who began his career as the leader of a terrorist organization, Abu Mazen was and remains primarily a politician and a diplomat. In this capacity he helped negotiate the 1995 Oslo Agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Movement. Partly for that reason, partly because he opposed his people’s armed uprising (the so-called Second Intifada of 2000-2003) some Israelis saw him as a more pliant partner than his predecessor had been.

It did not work that way. Whether through his own fault, or that of Israel, or both, during all his eighteen years in office Abu Mazen has failed to move a single step closer to a peace settlement. Israel on its part has never stopped building new settlements and is doing so again right now. As a result, Palestinian terrorism and Israeli retaliatory measures in the West Bank in particular are once again picking up, claiming dead and injured almost every day.

Nor is the West Bank the only region where Israelis and Palestinians keep clashing. Just a few weeks have passed since the death, in an Israeli jail and as a result of a hunger strike, of a prominent Palestinian terrorist. His demise made the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization in Gaza launch no fewer than a thousand rockets at Israel, leading to Israeli air strikes, leading to more rockets, and so on in the kind of cycle that, over the last twenty years or so, has become all too familiar. Fortunately Hezbollah, another Islamic terrorist organization whose base is Lebanon, did not intervene. It is, however, not at all certain that, should hostilities in and around Gaza resume, it won’t follow up on its leader’s threats to do just that. Certainly it has the capability and the plans; all that is needed is a decision.

To his concerns about Jordan and Iran, I would add the following. First, Syria is looking for revenge for the frequent air attacks of the last few years in support of the anti-Assad rebels. Second, and much more importantly, both China and Russia are more closely allied with the Arabs than they have been since the 1950s and the USA has never looked more impotent and less able to impose any sort of peace on the region.

While Israel has wisely held itself apart from the Kiev regime despite its many close connections to it, it is still part of the NATO bloc and therefore an enemy to both Russia and China. It’s not necessarily the best time to be the self-styled “greatest ally” of the United States.

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Why “Posterity” Matters

Six years ago, I debated Col. Tom Kratman on the topic of what the word “posterity” means in the context of the U.S. Constitution, specifically, the preamble which declares to whom the Constitution and the Bill of Rights applies.

I was correct, of course, to point out that posterity meant only the American Revolutionaries and their descendants, which is why the rights protected by the U.S. Constitution do not apply to many U.S. residents and even citizens. If you are not a direct descendant of an American Revolutionary, then the Constitution does not apply to you, no matter what the U.S. Supreme Court might claim.

The importance of correct interpretation of historical legal terms can be seen in the recent protest by the Global Times against sovereign U.S. States passing laws against foreign entities buying up their land.

CNN reported on Monday that “a growing number of states are considering or have passed measures this legislative term to ban ‘foreign adversaries’ and foreign entities – specifically China – from buying farmland.” These bills could violate the US Constitution, and also fuel an atmosphere of racism and anti-China sentiment.

Against the backdrop of increasingly strong anti-China sentiment in the US, it seems the “land purchase ban” is an inevitable product. Regarding the “land purchase ban,” several US-China relations experts interviewed by CNN warned against knee-jerk responses and called for lawmakers to act on evidence, not suspicion. There are certainly some rational people in the US who can see that this approach violates the US Constitution. However, in the current political atmosphere in the US, all anti-China actions are politically correct domestically, those who are willing to come out and speak up are the minority and their voices are often ignored.

The Posterity for whom the Constitution is intended to defend the Blessings of Liberty consists solely of the genetic descendants of the People of the several and united States. Posterity does not include immigrants, descendants of immigrants, invaders, conquerors, tourists, students, Americans born in Portugal, or anyone else who happens to subsequently reside in the same geographic location, or share the same civic ideals, as the original We the People.

Nor does it include sovereign foreign governments.

But as you can see, once the definition of “posterity” is expanded past its true and proper meaning, there is no reason it cannot be further expanded into a universal principle. Which, of course, is complete nonsense, and thereby demonstrates the practical impossibility of every other interpretation.

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You Really Didn’t, Donald

President Trump still thinks he hired the best people for his administration:

During a portion of an interview with the Fox News Channel aired on Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” 2024 Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump responded to questions on why he hired so many people who he has now criticized or have criticized him by stating the overwhelming majority of people he hired were good hires, he did hire the best people, and that he “didn’t know” Washington, but does now.

Trump said, [relevant remarks begin around 16:10] “When I came down to Washington, I was in Washington 17 times in my life in D.C., and I never stayed overnight. I was never there. I didn’t know the people. I didn’t know that world, other than I was involved in politics from the other side very much. And I had — I put great people in, but I put some people like Bill Barr and Bolton and a few of them that — actually, Bolton was good because everybody — every time I negotiated, people said, oh, they’ve got this maniac here. He’s going to go to war with us and they’d concede every point. It was actually pretty good in a certain way. But we put people in that were great and we put people in that weren’t. I now know Washington probably better than anybody. I know the good ones and the bad ones.”

Host Bret Baier then noted that Trump vowed to only hire the best people in 2016. Trump responded, “Well, I did do that.”

No. The best people absolutely were not hired. Mike Cernovich explained why: all the genuine experts were eliminated during the vetting process by the Swamp creatures performing it.

Does anyone truly believe that his economics advisors were better than Steve Keen or me? Does anyone seriously think that he wouldn’t have done better to consult with the likes of Lind and van Creveld on defense matters?

And let’s not even get started on Fauci….

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Biden as Valens

Martin Armstrong draws a historical parallel:

My phone has been in meltdown ever since Trump was arrested… EVERY phone call I have had from Asia to Europe, they are all expressing complete shock that the United States is collapsing and they are now all seeing that our forecast that the 2024 Presidential Election would be the most corrupt in history and market the END of democracy in the United States.

These people just do not get it, they crossed the line and now the view of the United States from the outside looking in, they no longer believe that America is the beacon of liberty to the world. It is becoming so obvious that our computer will be right again. I warned it even was showing that the 2024 election might not even take place. That was a small 18% probability, but that NEVER came up EVER in this history of running our political models – NEVER!

This year, 2023, was a MAJOR Directional Change that was showing up in both the LEFT & the RIGHT databases. The year 2025 is when a president would take office in January. This has been the #1 target on our political models for decades. The NEOCONS are in full control of the government. There is no way to stop the collapse of the United States at this point. Nobody will listen and there is nothing I can do. People often ask what if people protested? We will never realize the opportunity to reestablish a new form of government post-2032 without the pain and destruction first.

During the Reign of Valentinian I and his brother, Valens, who came to power in 364AD where Valentinian I died in 375 and Valens ruled into 378, there are serious correlations from both and economic and monetary perspective. They too saw their power weakening so they allowed the Goths to cross the Danube and settle within Roman territory provided they would also then serve in the Roman military. This is what is really behind Biden allowing all these people to flood in through the border. What they do not realize, is that history repeats as Biden grants citizenship in return for military service. The Neocons want to build an army to defeat China and Russia simultaneously.

We all know what happens when you don’t sink the ships. Eventually, the barbarians take over the government. In 2004, when I first predicted the collapse of the USA as a political entity in 2033, the prediction was seen as an utter absurdity. Now, it’s not looking crazy at all.

We’ll know it was dead on when people start denying that I could possibly have seen it coming three decades in advance. But history always rhymes, and the patterns are there for those with the education and the wherewithal to read them.

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The Course of Future History

Like Paul Krugman, Peter Turchin was inspired by Asimov’s Foundation. Unlike Krugman, Turchin appears to understand that psychohistory is not merely fiction, it is impossible due to the instability introduced by mathematical chaos theory.

I am often asked by people who first encounter Cliodynamics whether I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, and what is the relationship between Asimov’s Psychohistory and Cliodynamics. I read Foundation some 35 years ago, and it left quite an impression. I actually begin my popular book War and Peace and War by referring to Hari Seldon and his prediction of the collapse of the Galactic Empire. So there is no question that Asimov’s ideas have been an influence.

However, there are many differences between the Asimov’s imaginary science of history and the reality of Cliodynamics. Asimov wrote Foundation in the 1940s – way before the discovery of what we now call ‘mathematical chaos.’ In Asimov’s book, Hari Seldon and psychohistorians develop mathematical methods to make very precise predictions years and decades in advance. Due to discoveries made in the 1970s and 80s we know that this is impossible.

In Asimov books Psychohistory, quite appropriately, deals not with individuals, but with huge conglomerates of them. It basically adopts a ‘thermodynamic’ approach, in which no attempt is made to follow the erratic trajectories of individual molecules (human beings), but instead models averages of billions of molecules. This is in many ways similar to the ideas of Leo Tolstoy, and indeed to cliodynamics, which also deals with large collectives of individuals.

What Asimov did not know is that even when you can ignore such things as individual free will, you still run against very strict limits to predictability. When components of a dynamical system interact nonlinearly, the resulting dynamics can become effectively unpredictable, even if they are entirely deterministic. For complex systems like human societies this possibility becomes a virtual certainty: they are complex and nonlinear enough and, therefore, must behave chaotically and unpredictably. This is, by the way, why weather cannot be predicted more than a few days in advance (and in Connecticut, where I live, not even a day in advance).

The hallmark of mathematical chaos is ‘sensitive dependence on initial conditions.’ In climate it means that a butterfly deciding to flutter its wings (or not) can cause a major hurricane to veer from its predicted path.

This is actually a very optimistic result. It means that human individuals are not as powerless as Asimov imagined them. Exercising one’s free will can have major consequences at the macrolevel, just like a butterfly fluttering its wings can affect the course of a hurricane. However, such optimism should be tempered by realism. Although each of us probably affects the course of human history, most of us have a very slight effect, and any large effects are probably a result of a completely unforeseen concatenation of events.

In short, making precise predictions about events in human societies decades or centuries in the future is just science fiction. It seems that Asimov himself became uneasy with the mechanistic unfolding of future history according to the Seldon Plan. He solved the problem by throwing in the Mule – a mutant with frightening mental powers who derails the actual history from the course predicted by Seldon. In actuality, we are all ‘Mules.’ By exercising a multitude of choices throughout our lives we constantly derail the course of future history in unpredictable directions.

There is, of course, a considerable amount of general predictability concerning the course of the future due to the fact that people are still people and behave according to the same behavioral patterns that have been exhibited reliably across the millennia. Alphas are going to alpha in the future, just as gammas gammad in the past. History does not repeat, but it rhymes sufficiently to provide us with a reasonable clue which way things are going; it was not difficult to anticipate the pendulum eventually swinging back with a vengeance on globalization and its manifold ills.

However, no purely material model will ever suffice, because no material model can account for either human evil or spiritual evil. And that is the fundamental weakness of cliohistory, since it takes no account of anything beyond the material world.

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I Do Not Support Free Speech

Andrew Torba has come a long way since he appeared on Brainstorm to introduce Gab to the community. I really respect his perseverance and appreciate what he’s accomplished. But he’s still clinging to his misapprehensions about free speech.

Doing this for almost seven years now I can tell you that sadly most people do not support free speech. Even those on “the right” who claim to beg Gab to censor certain words and ideas because it offends them or whatever. The good news is those of us who do support it are waking a lot of the people in the middle up, who then in turn end up supporting it after being censored themselves or learning something on Gab thanks to free speech.

At the risk of substituting dialectic for rhetoric, I took the liberty of correcting his meme for historical accuracy.

You needn’t take my word for it. Read JB Bury’s A History of the Freedom of Thought. It’s written by a major historian of the early 20th century who is a strong free speech advocate, and he’s not shy about explaining how the right to free speech came to be and what it was intended to accomplish.

If God believed in free speech, blasphemy would not be a sin.

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Disney Adopts Zero History

Once a premier curator of American history, the skinsuit of the company founded by Walt Disney has opted for historical oblivion and the destruction of its own artifacts:

Walt had a vision of himself as one of the Big Americans, that his name would be remembered with men like Ford and Edison. Whether he genuinely felt an accurate record of his life and work would reflect well on him or he knew he was going to be in the history books anyway so he would be well served by writing the history book himself, he is one of the very few businessmen to start a museum dedicated to curating his life, his work and the company he built up from nothing.

So was born the Walt Disney Company Archive. Or simply The Archive. Just about every major or even minor thing the Walt Disney Company ever was a part of was dutifully curated. Decommissioned park attractions that were being dismantled would have disused animatronics packed away and sent to the archive. Every single addition and more importantly subtraction to the parks was carefully noted at the Archive. Artwork from all of the Disney animated features were meticulously cataloged and preserved at the Archive.

The Archive also operates public museums where you can gawk at such diverse things as Disneyland opening day curios, doodads, and tourist gimcrack. Want to see the real Pirates Redhead? She now lives at the archive. Original scripts, props from the Davey Crockett show. Various denizens of Tomorrowland’s obsolete future past are on display at The Archive.

You know what you won’t find at the Archive? Not one fucking thing connected with Splash Mountain. The most popular ride in the history of Disney parks and not one trace of it was curated.

The preservation of historical knowledge is one of the most sacred and important things that can be accomplished even by the irreligious. So it should come as no surprise that eradicating history is always among the foremost objectives of the Zero Historians in their permanent campaign against all that is Good, Beautiful, and True.

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The Testimony of Elie Wiesel

The award-winning author of NIGHT admits to telling stories about things that could have happened, but never did.

“‘What are you writing?’ the Rebbe asked. ‘ – Stories,’ I said. He wanted to know what kind of stories: true stories. ‘About people you have knew?’ Yes, about people I might have known. ‘About things that happened?’ Yes, about things that happened or could have happened. ‘But they did not?’ No, not all of them did. In fact, some some were invented from almost the beginning to almost the end. The Rebbe leaned forward as if to measure me up and said with more sorrow than anger: ‘That means that you are writing lies!’ I did not answer immediately. The scolded child within me had nothing to say in his defense. Yet, I had to justify myself. ‘Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; other are – although they never occurred.'”

Elie Wiesel, LEGENDS OF OUR TIME, Schocken Books, New York, 1982, p. viii

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Regression to the Historical Mean

Harold Robinson takes the time to explain the obvious and inevitable, namely, the inability of complex systems to survive the incompetent:

America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible for selection for competence to return, because the demographic changes to the US population means that politics are no longer ideology-based, but identity-based, and people from cultures that have never valued individual merit in any way are not going to start doing so in a post-meritocratic United States.

Furthermore, the average level of intelligence, and therefore, the average level of competence, has declined with the mass infusion of inferior genetics, to such an extent that the average IQ is probably 10 points lower than it was before 1965, when the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 was superseded by the Immigration and Nationality Act.

One doesn’t need to be a eugenicist to understand the societal consequences of long-term dysgenics. Think of it as large-scale regression to the historical mean, or, if you’re not an abstract thinker, why the USA is going to lose its ability to provide widespread indoor plumbing to its inhabitants.

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