The Reactionary Left, or Modern Enlightened Thought[2010]

 Matt Ridley, at his "The Rational Optimist" blog, links approvingly to an essay by Fred Siegel in "City Journal," about how progressivism turned against Progress in the 1960s. I commented on "The Rational Optimist":

You may have observed that you get the best fit to activist behavior if you assign a value of 4.0 to the emotional age of activists. The evolution of liberal activist attitudes described by Siegel can be entirely explained by the "Well I never really wanted that anyway!" response.

As Siegel notes, everything promised by the Left was being achieved, even over-achieved, by 1960. The problem was, it was being achieved without the Left's methods. We were coming off 8 years of Eisenhower and gray flannel suits, remember? So the Left [...] had to either admit that 1950s free enterprise and gray flannelism worked at least as well as Leftism, or declare "Well I never really wanted that anyway!"

They chose the latter course. Not for the last time either.

To make a long story short, 80 years ago, socialism was a moral imperative because it was the best way to create smoke-belching factories and deliver copious goods to the masses. 40 years ago, socialism was a moral imperative because it was the best way to prevent smoke-belching factories while still delivering copious goods to the masses. The Wall fell, and today socialism is a moral imperative because it's the best way to prevent smoke-belching factories and keep copious goods out of the piggish hands of the masses.

[I edited out a redundant "either".]

From the environmentalist revolution of the 1960s until after the collapse of Soviet Communism, it was axiomatic on the Left that socialist governments would be incomparably better stewards of the environment than capitalist governments. But once the socialist governments fell, it became undeniable that they had, in fact, been worse. There needed to be some way that capitalism was still wrong. Since capitalism had long ago proven to be more productive, and since it was now undeniable that the productivity had not been bought with greater environmental impact, there was only one path left. Productivity had to be a bad thing.  Sure, at one time socialism had been supposedly superior because it was supposedly more productive. But that was then. This is now.

And so, we have locavores. Capitalism is able to bring you strawberries in February? BAD! BAD! BAD CAPITALISM!

PBS, "NOVA", and Kennewick Man

Clayton Cramer has a blog post about the PBS "NOVA" program  on Kennewick Man. I haven't watched NOVA for 20 years or so, for reasons I explained in my comment to that post:

I may have to give Nova another chance. It won't be easy, though.

I pretty much haven't watched it in about 20 years, since the program on the "wild man" of Hunan Province, China. In the intro, they said it was based on the work of Ohio State physical anthropologist Gary Poirier (pronounced as French). I thought "What a coincidence, I took physical anthro at Ohio State from Frank Poirier (pronounced the way it's spelled, of Armenian decent). And he's interested in the same kind of stuff."

Then they showed "Gary Pwa-ree-ay" and it was the guy I had at OSU, Frank Poirier. The whole show was based on his work, he was on-camera a lot, and they got his name completely wrong. Made it hard for me to take "Nova" seriously after that.

There was also the NOVA episode about how MIT invented radar in WWII. (Hint: MIT didn't invent radar.)

Anyway, Clayton Cramer recommends the episode on Kennewick Man, and is even planning to use it in the American History class he teaches. So I may have to break my two decade NOVA fast.

From a teenager, I wondered why the possibility of humans in the New World prior to about 20,000 years ago, was so taboo. Then I heard an anthropologist stating, with heavy emphasis, that DNA evidence proved beyond any doubt that the ancestors of today's Native Americans arrived in the New World more recently than 20,000 years ago, and therefore any evidence of humans in the New World prior to then, must be rejected.

And the penny dropped. The problem was that any humans in the Americas prior to 20,000 years were not ancestors to today's Native Americans, but were replaced by them. That overturns the whole "First Americans" noble savage narrative. Hence the taboo.

Kennewick Man stirred this pot but good, since his remains were first identified as Caucasian, then as possibly related to the Ainu, the aborigines of Japan. (The Ainu themselves were originally identified as Caucasian by the first Europeans to study them.) And he was carbon-dated to 9,300 years ago.

So Kennewick Man gives us this picture: an aboriginal New World population is displaced by the ancestors of today's Native Americans. This is inconceivably anti-PC. If Kennewick Man turned out to be Caucasian, it would be Slartibartfast's-signature-on-the-glacier-level proof that God exists and has a sophomoric sense of humor. Native American tribes in the Kennewick area wisely invented a cultural aversion to DNA testing of ancient, unidentified remains. Who knows how many faculty clubs would have been littered with exploded brains otherwise.

BTW, one of Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" novels features a time-traveling anthropologist studying an  encounter between New World aborigines and Palaeo-Indians. I suspect it's a lot more accurate than the politically correct narrative where the aborigines never existed.

Purple Hearts

Random Jottings has a post on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. My comment:

The War Department ordered 750,000 Purple Heart medals for the invasion of Japan, to be awarded to servicemen killed or wounded. Because of the atomic bomb, they weren't needed, and were stored.

Some of them,  were awarded during the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and other conflicts. They are still being issued in Iraq and Afghanistan today.

All the combat seen by American forces since WWII still have not equaled the first installment of what was expected in Japan.

(The number actually awarded in WWII was about 965,000.)

In my opinion, the invasion of Japan would not have taken place even without use of the atomic bomb. The US would simply have continued the submarine campaign against Japanese shipping, and the air campaign against Japan itself, and starved and bombed Japan to death. This would have minimized Allied losses, while killing many times more Japanese, and destroying Japan as a nation, a culture, and a people.

One thing people don't grasp is that US war production was still ramping up when it ended. The US Navy canceled more aircraft carriers scheduled to be launched in 1946, than the Japanese Navy had built in its entire history. Henry Ford's production line for B-24 bombers had just gone into operation in Michigan. It took in aluminum stock at one end and launched a bomber every 60 minutes at the other. All that firepower, and nowhere to use it but Japan.

Most of those Purple Hearts  would have gone into storage anyway, The people who call the use of the atomic bomb a war crime, would be calling the failure to use it a war crime, with considerably more justification. It's very unlikely that I would be blogging about it, in either case, since my mother was working in a clerical position for Japanese Army Intelligence in Nagoya.

All those books

The Sunday Book Thread post at Ace of Spades is about the flood of American Civil War and WWII books. My comment:

I once caught a panel discussion on the Civil War on C-SPAN. At the beginning, the moderator said that since the end of the Civil War, more than one book a day has been published with Civil War-related material. This is also true of the Napoleonic Wars.  Undoubtedly true of WWII.

So I avoid any book about the Civil War or Napoleon, and concentrate on falling behind with WWII.

I think it's also true of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

I like Mongolian history. You can read a book every 3 or 4 years and stay current.

WWII? Who writes this stuff?

Squid314's LiveJournal (via Volokh Conspiracy with a hat tip to Instapundit, like he needs it) has an amusing rant about the implausibility of that World War II show on the History Channel. And both he and Volokh forget to mention the comic relief, the Barney Fife of the Axis, Benito Mussolini.

After you've read enough WWII history, you start to wonder why anyone bothers to make anything up.  Squid314 touches on only a few of the unlikely plot twists. You also have the most critical battle of the war, the Battle of the Atlantic, going the right way because of, not one, but two miracles. You have the Battle of Britain won, arguably, not in spite of the fact that the head of RAF Fighter Command was certifiably insane, but because he was. You have Thermopylae in the Pacific, in which the unarmored ships of Taffy 3 turned back a Japanese fleet including the two most powerful battleships ever built, battleships that were designed specifically as US Navy-killers, the Japanese admiral defending his decision to run by saying, "No one could be that brave." You have the Japanese War Cabinet voting to continue the war after the second atomic bomb, the Emperor overriding the War Cabinet, young officers staging a military coup against him, with the wax discs on which the Emperor's surrender speech had been recorded as the McGuffin. (They escaped the young officers by being hidden in the Empress's makeup cabinet.)

And that's just some of the big items off the top of my head.

Bacon and Buccaneers

Don Surber wonders why calling someone a "cracker" is considered offensive. I explain:

The original crackers were herding pigs, using whips to keep the pork moving. Another word derived from pigherding is “buccaneer,” a corruption of an old French word for pig farmer (i.e., “baconeer”).

So when you call someone a “cracker,” you’re accusing him of being a fan of the Tamp[a] Bay NFL team. Hence the term’s offensiveness.

The first paragraph is all true, as far as I know. "Buccaneer" came to mean a pirate because pirates, like other sailors of the time, ate a lot of pork. Pirates who got too old to pirate any more (not a large percentage, I would guess) would settle down on some Caribbean isle and raise pigs, which they would smoke and trade to pirate ships for whatever they needed. So old pirates became baconeers, and eventually all pirates became buccaneers.

The second paragraph is admittedly a stretch. But really, naming a team after murderous, thieving pirates is offensive. If someone was stealing your FedEx shipments and selling them on eBay, would you cheer for a team named after him? What next, the Toledo Taliban? The San Jose SS? The Wisconsin McCarthyites? The University of Phoenix Concern Trolls?

Two billion years ago, two galaxies were colliding

The World History Blog has an interesting post on how, shortly after WWII, the "Superman" radio show was used to knock the Ku Klux Klan down a peg. Reporter Stetson Kennedy gave the "Superman" writers inside information on how the Klan operated, to be used in scripts. The Klan attempted to pressure the show's sponsors but it wasn't enough to stop the scripts. I commented:

Also, the negative reaction was probably less than it would have been if the information had appeared in a more "serious" form. SF and fantasy have been useful to express ideas contrary to the zeitgeist for a long time, "1984" and "Animal Farm" being examples.

Back in the 1930s, when all "serious" writers were waving a sad farewell to weak democracy and making the best deal possible with their tough new fascist overlords, E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman stories subversively depicted the victory of a free, multispecies melting pot over the totalitarian Empire of Boskone.

When the original "Addams Family" TV series was on, with Carolyn Jones and John Astin, one critic noted that it was the only series with an intact family where everyone respected each other. And where but on "Smallville" do we get teenagers who are grateful to their parents.

No, I don't know if Stetson Kennedy was mild-mannered. The title of this post is a line from "Doc" Smith.

Redcoats vs Rebels in Northern Ireland

James Rummel, over at Hell in a Handbasket, has a post about... well, it's a little complicated.

It turns out that there is an Ulster American Folk Park, some kind of a theme park where the theme is the USA. For the 4th of July this year, they're going to re-enact the War of 1812. Apparently there are also American Revolutionary War re-enactors in Ireland. And they're importing American re-enactors to play the part of British Redcoats.

So Americans are going to Ireland to play British Redcoats so Irish playing American colonials can pretend to shoot them in the War of 1812. To quote Hermione Granger, "Please don't ask me to say it again."

[CORRECTION: The Redcoats are being played by British re-enactors (see James's comment below, thanks!) This explains why they're re-enacting the War of 1812, the British re-enactors probably like to burn the White House every chance they get.]

My only comment was:

I once ran across the website of Ukrainian Vietnam War re-enactors. They dress up in US Army uniforms.

That's all I could manage. Archaeologists are going to dig this stuff up 4000 years from now and I don't know what they'll do.

From Enemy to Friend

Famous blog babe Megan McArdle is bemused by the Russian spy ring that was recently exposed by the FBI. The best she can do is "In fact, the only parallel I can think of is the possibly apocraphyl allegation that during the Cold War, Soviet intelligence subscribed to the Village Voice for several years . . . in an attempt to find out about rural life in America. "

I commented:

A non-apochryphal version of the Village Voice story can be found in "From Enemy to Friend" by Bui Tin. Bui Tin is best known as the North Vietnamese colonel who accepted the surrender of the President of South Vietnam. But one of his earlier jobs was translating American magazine articles for consumption by North Vietnamese leadership.

He said that he was never able to get across to his superiors the insignificance of individual magazine articles, and the lack of influence by, say, the New York Review of Books on the Nixon White House. He was continually horrified to hear top leadership debating some article he had translated as if it were American gospel.

Bui Tin crossed the authorities in postwar Vietnam and found it advisable to move to France. The book is his FAQ, answers to the questions he's always asked about the Vietnam War.

One of the most interesting chapters is about the secret treaties between China and North Vietnam. China promised to help defend North Vietnam against attack by the US on a tit-for-tat basis. If the US attacked North Vietnam by air, the Chinese air forces would come in to defend North Vietnamese air space. If the US Navy shelled North Vietnam, the Chinese navy would intervene to stop the shelling.

Of course, China didn't do any of this. They just looked the other way and whistled tunelessly as their North Vietnamese friends went out on the limb and got pummeled. If you ever wondered, "What's more worthless than a treaty," the answer is "A secret treaty."

The book is short and a worthwhile read if you're interested in the history of the Vietnam War. If you can find it; it's currently listed as unavailable at Amazon.

Only known photos...

... of French Resistance fighters about to be executed by a Nazi firing squad.

Every person who sees this picture is a person the Nazis hoped would never exist.

Charles Csuri, computer animation pioneer

Ed Driscoll incautiously mentions the historical origins of 3D computer graphics at his blog. I don't know anything about computer graphics, but I did have a brush with its history.

You mention that 3d computer graphics date back to the 1970s. A lot of the early work on 3d computer animation was done by Charles Csuri at Ohio State. His empire was next to the laboratory where I did my graduate work from 1979 on. I’d often catch glimpses of what they were doing as I walked down the hall, and see the final results on TV a few months later.

Csuri was an interesting guy. He was an All-American linebacker for Woody Hayes, then came back to Ohio State as an art professor. But the Art Department refused to support his work with computers since, to them, that wasn’t Art. He switched to the Computer Science Department, and eventually became one of the biggest funding magnets on campus.

Csuri was once contacted about working on a movie called “Star Wars” but turned them down. Couldn’t spare the time. But he gave them the name of a student who was about to graduate and needed a job, and they hired the guy. Worked out real good for him.

That was off the top of my head. The Wikipedia article on Charles Csuri adds some detail. He's an even more interesting guy than I made him out to be.

Amphibious Warfare

Richard Fernandez, at his excellent Belmont Club blog, asks Is Amphibious Warfare Obsolete? I pointed out in comments:

Amphibious warfare was already declared dead, after the Gallipoli debacle in WWI.

In the 1930s, the Commandant of the Marine Corps realized that a war with Japan would require amphibious operations. But there was no “book” on amphibious operations, no doctrine. Also, like I said, Gallipoli had convinced many that it wasn’t practical.

There were no think tanks in those days, and the Marine Corps had no budget for such things. So what happened was, a bunch of Marine officers arrived at Quantico to go to school, lieutenants expecting to learn how to become captains, majors to become colonels, etc. Instead they were told their job was, one, to determine if Gallipoli really had closed the book on amphibious warfare, and two, if not, to write it.

They concluded “No” to the question, and wrote the “Tentative Landing Operations Manual,” which became the basis of Marine and US Army doctrine used in WWII, and still used today.

So if history is a guide, a fundamental rewrite of doctrine may be what’s needed to keep the amphibious option alive.

The Marines have long recognized the problems with amphibious landings against modern weapons. That's why they've continued to push for the V-22 Osprey, despite its well-publicized problems. But a technological fix like the V-22 may not be enough.

Music and codebreaking

Joanne Jacobs has a post on "Music students excel in algebra" over at her education blog. The connection between music and math is hardly new, of course. Pythagoras was all about that. I commented:

The USS California was one of the ships sunk in the attack on Pearl Harbor, and her crew was parceled out to whatever units needed manpower. The members of the ship’s band were assigned to the Navy’s codebreaking unit because, by coincidence, the number of band members matched the number of men requested. Fortunately they were very successful at their new job. Apparently, many of the skills transferred.

By the way, ship's band is not a full-time job. Except for the higher-ranking officers and specialists, like the ship's doctor, there are no fulltime jobs. Sailors do different jobs depending on the situation. When "Battle Stations!" is announced, cooks may man antiaircraft guns, and band members join damage-control parties.