Posted by Bob on June 24, 2006 at 1:01 pm
We have all heard the term “a ship of the line” from the days when Britain was in absolute command of the seas. The man who invented the “line ahead” formation that was so instrumental in giving Britannia true control over the waves has one especially interesting attribute. Not only did he never leave Britain, but he was never on a ship in his entire life, even in port.
The famous British redcoats got their uniform from Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. Cromwell was in his middle age when he developed the New Model Army, training his troops in the methods Gustavus Adolphus had been using in the Thirty Years’ War before he was killed at, I believe, Lützen. The New Model Army, from its first day in battle, swept every opponent from the field. Cromwell always beat everybody.
Cromwell’s New Model was the basis of all British ground combat for about two centuries.
As I said, Cromwell was a middle-aged man before he led his New Model Army to its first victory. Before that, he had never been in the army, he had never been in a battle, he had never even HEARD a hostile shot fired.
One thing you are NOT going to see emphasized in a military history is that, when the British Empire was at its height and Britannia rules the waves, it might not have ruled anything without the techniques developed by complete military amateurs.
So let’s ask a question. Please note that this is 1) a question with so obvious an answer one feels silly asking it, and 2) a question absolutely no one ever considers when they look at history or anything else that doesn’t have the word “Advertisement” written all over it. That question is, “Why wouldn’t a military academy textbook emphasize that the developer of the line ahead formation and the New Model Army were both amateurs?
The obvious answer, so obvious it seems silly to state it, is that those who buy books for military academies want to emphasize how PROFESSIONAL military men are the only ones who know how to run an army or a navy.
This is rather obvious, but no one seems to take it into account. For example, when I was young I always heard that absolutely everything was created in the Cradle of Civilization, the Middle East. Even as a teenager, when this belief was absolute, it struck me as unlikely. The Middle East was made up of absolute, top to-bottom, rigid tyrannies. All intellectual life was owned by the priests. How could such a rigid tyranny invent NEW things?
It took me a while to realize WHY this doctrine ruled. It was taught in schools where the ability to read and write and do arithmetic were also taught. So history said that the societies that read and wrote and followed rules were the places where everything began and the only means by which truth triumphed over a mankind that was not better than the apes.
This was not a conscious choice. But that was the history schools at the time would obviously want so that was the history they got.
Isaac Asimov wrote his whole Foundation Trilogy in the early 1950s based on the idea that only an Empire could produce original ideas. After the Fall of Egypt or the Fall of Rome, history said, everything became stagnant and brutal and filthy until a new Empire based on scribes and bureaucracy came again. That is the absolute basis of the Foundation Trilogy, and it is exactly what everybody took to be true history in 1950.
The idea was that only a totally centralized bureaucratic state could INVENT things. New ideas only came from a rigid, bureaucratized state. It was assumed that the only argument against Communism, with everybody reporting Soviet leaps and bounds in production with every Five-Year Plan, was that it took away too much freedom.
No one doubted Communism was as successful as it claimed to be. It was just too mean about it.
Of course, everybody was wrong on every single point.
But how could you PREDICT they were wrong, when every statistic and historical instance and Future Inevitability they all the professionals announced said they were right? The way to do it would be to analyze each and every piece of information, each Theory of History, each Future Inevitably by ONE criterion:
Does anybody have a reason to WANT this to be true?
Professional scholars wanted it to be true that only a society which had a huge army of bureaucrats and scribes could accomplish anything. Asimov took this to a laughable extreme, but only laughable TODAY. At the time it was a sober analysis.
Intellectual life is an infomercial.
Treat it accordingly.
#1 by Simmons on 06/12/2009 - 12:34 pm
The cult of PHDs which hold sway on our side of the racial debate would be at home in any “empire of progress.” I have always asked as I did in yesterday’s AR forum how is it we are supposed to identify “race” when we are rewarding and punishing thru Affirmative Action. We are told race is a social construct but I doubt anyone would believe I to be an asian-American if I stated such on a legal document.
One simple devastating question would rid us of the PC myths. But those on our side play by the rules and live for the crumbs and so no one asks how we identify and prove what race is if we are to award or displace based on race.
I want our government to provide legally binding regulations as to what race is and how goodies are to be distributed. I can see it now Federal rule one billion or something; Those with DNA marker A50009G500 will be immediately canned and replaced with those carrying such and such allele.
#2 by Dave on 06/12/2009 - 1:10 pm
Sociopaths are fundamentally juvenile. They never realize that they are bargaining for something that doesn’t make any sense. But don’t think they are wimps. That is a wrong take on them.
Let’s take an example of one that is seemingly (though not racially) “on our side”: Justin Raimondo. He a very useful brand of sociopath because his intellect is high powered enough to do an outstanding job of articulating bleeding edge nonsense (that we here in BUGS should have the sense to avoid) in all of its splendid texture.
Like sociopaths in general Raimondo thinks he is an observer of his own life. This is the substance of a fool.
Accordingly, he never grasps what he is really doing (which is cogently delivering to us what we need to ideologically avoid).
BUGS is “one up” on the whole charade. We don’t give a damn about anything but race.
That is the winning formula.
#3 by Tim on 06/13/2009 - 6:27 pm
Simmons,
Good input. I always try to point out the simple fact in multiracial crowds that everyone feels like they are attacked racially…..BUT race is not supposed to exists. Africans feel like they are attacked because of RACE. Asians feel the same way. Believe it or not it is universal in that regard. But Whites are the only ones with any true lasting power.
Whites are always comedy. Whites KNOW that they are being targeted because of their race. BUT most of the fools are too demoralized to admit that RACE exists. You got to beat them over the head with carrots (using one of Horus’s phrases). So I do my part and keep beating the self hating whites…..”isolating the lone rangers”.
Dave,
Raimondo is a Randian (Ayn Rand philosophy). Randianism is WORDISM. I need say no more. He gets on the Jews backs for being out for themselves…….lol……some whites never get it and never will.
#4 by backbaygrouch4 on 06/15/2009 - 11:26 pm
Reading this piece in Takimag I kept thinking, this guy has been reading Bob Whitaker, perhaps, even his Blasts From The Past. Odd how Bob’s insights get recycled withour attribution. I’d wouldn’t mind reading a few new ones, Bob.
http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/#3563
The Cult of Experts and the Science of Deathby Robert Stacy McCain on June 15, 2009
My wife worked for many years in the health field, including a stint in a hospital physical therapy unit and a few years as a home-health assistant. One of the things she would tell you is that if your back hurts, surgery won’t fix it. Over and over again, she treated people who had undergone back surgery yet who continued to suffer chronic pain.
Maybe the science of orthopedic surgery has advanced in the past decade. Maybe not. Ask around among your friends and see if any of them have undergone surgery for a ruptured disc, et cetera, and what you’re likely to get is a tale of woe. Few of these tales of woe, however, will be as sad as the story recounted by blogger Carol at No Sheeples Here about the death of 1950s matinee idol Jeff Chandler:
Shortly after completing his role in Merrill’s Marauders in 1961, he injured his back while playing baseball with U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers who served as extras in that movie. Chandler had surgery for a spinal disc herniation on May 13, 1961. There were severe complications following surgery. An artery was damaged and Chandler hemorrhaged. In a seven-and-a-half-hour emergency operation over-and-above the original surgery, he was given 55 pints of blood. Another operation followed where he received an additional 20 pints of blood. He died on June 17, 1961 at the age of 42. His death was deemed malpractice.
The more you know about actual science, the less impressed you are with the claims of capital-S “Science,” by which term I mean to denote the pseudo-religious belief system that atrributes to mankind an impossible perfection of knowledge.
Actual science involves the ascertaining and application of facts, with the knowledge that there are more facts in the universe than any person can ever possibly know. The pseudo-religion of Science, by contrast, involves the belief that “experts” already know all the important facts, and that much of what we normally call “common sense” is contradicted by the facts most recently discovered by these experts, who constitute the high priesthood of the cult of Science.
The authority of the priestly caste of experts is beyond question, and any ordinary person disposed to skepticism of the claims of Science—“Hmmm, that doesn’t match up with what I know from common sense”—is denounced as “unscientific,” un-science being heresy to the belief system. The actual scientist may generally be distinguished from the fraudulent expert of Science by the ferocity with which the latter insists that his own theories are beyond dispute. The fraud fears facts that contradict his theory, since his reputation as an expert is the primary source of his authority, whereas the actual scientist is always pleased to encounter some fact that he has not hitherto taken into consideration.
Of course, the bogus expertise of the high priesthood of Science is a lucrative thing. Fortune and fame await the man who can convince others that he is the pre-eminent expert in some important field of inquiry. Consider the case of Alfred Kinsey, an obscure entomologist who cleverly foresaw the advantages to becoming the world’s foremost “scientific” authority on sex. Or think of Sigmund Freud, the Viennese physician who re-invented himself as master of the new “science” of psychotherapy. To this day, long after actual science has debunked the mystic voodoo of Freudianism, one still hears otherwise intelligent people discuss Freudian conceptions as if describing real phenomena.
In few fields have the experts of Science wreaked so much havoc as in the field of economics. Friedrich Hayek, an actual scientist of economics, almost surely had John Maynard Keynes in mind when he described as “second-hand dealers in ideas” the intellectuals who promoted socialsm in the mid-20th century:
The typical intellectual . . . need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular, nor need he even be particularly intelligent, to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write, and a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself.
Whatever his deficiencies as an economist, Keynes was a master at presenting himself as an expert, and getting others to treat him as an authority whose opinion must be respected. In this, if in nothing else, members of the priestly caste of Science are truly expert—that is, they are experts at convincing others of their expertise.
Think about how, when Timothy Geithner’s nomination as Treasury secretary was before the Senate, we were told that Geithner—who couldn’t even correctly calculate his own income tax—was nonetheless the only man in the country who could save our economic fortunes. Even Republicans praised Geithner, with Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah calling him “a person of great integrity.”
Last week, financial analyst James Quinn portrayed Geithner, President Obama and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as the Larry, Curly and Moe of an economic slapstick routine that would be hysterically funny, if only the consequences weren’t so predictably tragic. When the chairwoman of the FDIC is reduced to literally knocking on wood against the prospects of a tsunami of foreclosures and bank failures, we ought to be skeptical of the economic voodoo being practiced by the experts of Science.
My own skepticism toward such expertise is most likely due to my having spent more than two decades in the newspaper business, journalism being its own sort of cult, with experts who denounce as heretical all those who doubt that mastery of the AP Stylebook is synonymous with omniscience. The newspaper business is nowadays dying a slow and painful death at the hands of its own priestly caste.
We should hardly be surprised that the journalistic priesthood sings the praises of the economic priesthood, even as Dr. Larry, Dr. Curly and Dr. Moe proceed to administer to the American economy the kind of Science that the surgeons provided to the late Jeff Chandler.
http://www.takimag.com/sniperstower/#3563
#5 by shari on 06/19/2009 - 11:45 am
I know that bugs isn’t about headlines,but this is good. Our city has been requiring any applicant to provide usernames and passwords for their social-networking sites. Now the ACLU is “concerned” about civil rights. Looks like the internet could be a problem for lefties without any help from any naziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews. I see what Horus means about somebody at a critical point. I’m sure there are plenty of fed up white women toiling away.