Archive for June, 2006

What Only Amateurs Can Do

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 wa 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 Brirtish 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 Adilphus had been using in the Thirty Years’ War before he was killed at, I believe, Luetzen. 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 historyis that, when the Brirtish Ampire 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 consides when they look at history or anything lelse 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.

Thisis 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 asbolute, topto-bottom, rigid tyrannies. All intellecutal life was owned bythe priests. How could such a rigid tyranny invent NEW things?

It took me a while to reallize 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 wwere 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 hsitory schools at the time would obviously want so that was the history they got.

Isaac Isamov 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 woul dbe to analyze each and every piece of information, each Theory of History, each Future Inevitably by ONE criterion:

Does anybody have a reaspn 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.

Intellectiual life is an infomercial.

Treat it accordingly.

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What’s Wrong With This Picture?

If you will read the piece below on Revisionism, you will see that you should never read

anything as if it is true.

But it is not wholey untrue, either.

You should read everything produced by the mass media, historical, current, and futuristic, as if it were an infomercial.

And please keep in mind that, as usual, much of what I am about to say SOUNDS like a joke.

But the reason it sounds funny is because it is so TRUE, not because it is false. So on to which history to believe and which not to believe.

On an infomercial, if the person talking says he has a little dog named Scottie, you can be

reasonably sure that, if he does have a dog, its name is Scottie. If he is just telling a

side story that doesnot ERQUIRE that he have a dog,but can be about anything else, you may

be reasonably sure he actually has a dog.

In other words, in an infomercial, the further you get away from the PRODUCT, the more you

can believe what is being said. By hte same token, when reading history or social

commentary or futurology, the further you get from the PRODUCT, which is how the present

intellectual fashion wants to have been or to be or going to be, the more you can believe

what they say.

So if a history book says George Washington was born in February of 1732 instead of June of

1732, there is no reason to doubt it. But if it says he only survived because an old

black slave woman who was later thrown to the wolves came up with a brilliant cure for the

illness he was dying from as an infant and murumurred to herself, “It takes a village to

save a child” in her native Manica language, you can be be pretty sure it’s not true.

All history, all news, and all futurology are infomercials. You know what the Product is.

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Revisionism

A commenter reminded me that there is such a thing as historical revisionism.

So let me remind you of three rules:

1) The past is never what the historians says it was;

2) The present is never what the official commenters say it is; and

3) The future is never what the paid futurologists say it will be.

So, the commenter asks, how can we review a history that is so often wrong? He is loooking

at point 1)

The truth of the matter lies in point 2)

All history and all futurology is based on the present, and on NOTHING else. Everything a

professional historian writers or puts on a documentary is cleared with those who have power

in the present. Just as all roads led to Rome, all history leads to the present.

To put this in plain English, the purpose of history is to show the influences that led to

the year 2006 as described on the newscasts. Today, interracial marriage is what every

decent person in history aspired to, but the production of a chuman by breeding humans with

chimpanzees, on which both Japanese and Russians began work, is an abomination.

That is how it is, os htat is the way everyone in hitory looked at it. If they didn’t, you

excuse them and show how they went wrong.

When the movie Soylent Green was made in the 1970s, every campus rang with the cry “Zero

Population Growth!” Every official historian and demographer showed how all decent opinion

had always led tot his conclusion.

Japan is a GREAT copier, like all Oriental countries. When we took up the ZPG cry. they

took it up better.

Every advanced country’s population is now aging. The biggest argument for open borders

today is how in the 1970s America, by some odd coincidence, did not produce enough young

people, so the third world, which was not listening to the ZPG crap, has to pour its

surpluses in here.

The connection is never made, of course. No historian or commenters could keep his job if

he made it. So the futurologists who predicted Soylent Green are now a little older and a

lot better paid, with all that experience and seniority behind them.

This is not a contradiction. They ARE more experienced. You have to understand what they

are experienced AT. We all knew thirty years ago that the only reason you would look at

what a demographer or a futurologist wrote thirty years before would be to get a good horse

laugh. But we still made a good try at destroying ourselves on their say-so.

Japan, as a the ultimate Oriental copier nation, is actually dying out because, along with

all that technology they superadopted in the 1970s, they also superadopted the West’s ZPG

craze as Eternal Truth.

So if futurologists are always wrong, what are they Experienced Experts AT?

They are experts at producing the kind of prediction that gets grants and gets published.

You do not tell those in power today that they will be out of power tomorrow. You do not

tell today’s ruling intellectual elite that people will be laughing at their present

fashiones — like ZPG — so hard they will be busing a gut.

It is true that futurologists are always predicting things that has the next generation

laughing so hard it busts a gut. That is what they do for a living, and they are good at

it.

You see, a historian, a contemporary commentator, and a futurology is EXACTLY like a

respectable conservative. He knows how to produce history or predictions or criticisms of

Political Corectness, respectively, which are just radical enough to look like a serious

challenge to modern thought, but never attacks anything BASIC.

Anyone who is worried about the information he receives should first think carefully over

the fundamental question: How is that information PRODUCED?

You wouldn’t buy a computer mouse without considering this question, but when policy determinations are made, it is totally forgotten.

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Joe Rorke? No Way!

Joe, somebody is using YOUR name to grouse about my not hitting “questions” and “topics” without specifying what any of them are:

Bob, I try to keep you humming. That’s my function. But I’m starting to get a little bored. There are too many questions that are not being asked. Some of the topics are very trivial compared to what the people need to know.

Comment by joe rorke

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Simmonx

In response to “When Reality is Other People’s Fantasy,” Simmons says:

NOT SPAM Well in market speak we have had basically what amounts to the “final
washout”, and now is the time to buy. Personally I can conceive of the
final days of “Liberalism”, and regardless if BW renounces anti-communism
or not Liberalism is aging faster than Elizibeth Taylor. The West’s god
of cheap energy is failing and the halcyon days of acting like messiah
to the dark masses are mostly in the rearview mirror of history. Two things
research “Peak Oil” and recommend a book about the last real white men
fighting the good fight in Rhodesia.

Comment by Simmons

MY REPLY:

That is my point today!

We need to stop bitching and start taking advantage of the fact that the Communist system went out with a whimper and the present Western one is dissolving before our eyes.

It makes me tired all over when I see somebody telling us how bad things are the way they have done all my life. It makes me tired all over when somebody seriously — as opposed to a recruiting tool — talks about closing the border. There are already planty of minorities here to destroy the white race by the “assimilation” conservatives keep demanding.

Whites were never a majority in the world. They RULED the world. Our task is actually a little easier. We need to SURVIVE in the world of today, when transportation is infintely easier. Nobody, but NOBODY, wants to live the way any other race but the white race lives. So they keep chasing us.

Soon liberals and conservatives, Republcians and Democrats, will be as forgotten as the Whig Party that held the White House in 1853 was by 1856. There is no place is a completely racial situation for anybody who blathers about how things are not racial.

So how do you deal with this new reality? Do you bitch about Jews and nothing else? Do you talk about border enforcement?

HELL, no! You position yourself to take over the position as spokesman for whites in a society where each race has its own spokesmen.

If these people want to keep repeating what they said twenty years ago, all I ask is that they get out of the damned way and let me and mine do something useful.

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