So apparently there’s some online strategy game called “Civilization VII” scheduled to be released next year (I’m not terribly interested in the entire subject of such games) and there’s an ongoing drama on Reddit and other venues due to the creators adding Harriet Tubman of all people as a playable political leader.
This rang a bell for me because I was reminded that there was some sort of political campaign a long time ago to replace president Andrew Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill with hers, because he was a slaveholder genocider racist and so on. I looked this up on Wikipedia and it seems that this has merely remained a plan so far.
Anyway, concluding that she must be some relevant figure in the US culture wars, I looked around on the SSC and Motte subreddits, plus this site, but I found that there has never been even one discussion on her so far. I looked up Askhistorians and other similar subreddits and concluded that any discussion on her life is resolutely suppressed by the mods (all dissenting comment chains get deleted basically).
Being a dissident rightist this obvious case of information suppression piqued my interest, so I looked up John Derbyshire’s website because I’ve usually followed his work. I found this rather hilarious piece of information (emphasis mine):
We have very few facts about Tubman's life and activities. Most of what people think they know comes from her own testimony, as narrated to friends after the Civil War. There are two problems there.
First problem: Tubman, who escaped from slavery in her mid-twenties, was illiterate all her life. She left no paper trail in the way of letters or diaries. Until her forties, when friends started taking down her reminiscences, we have only her word for the events of her earlier life.
This wouldn't matter so much if we didn't know she had brain problems: narcolepsy, delusions, apparently epileptic fits. Tubman acknowledged these problems, saying they were the result of a blow on the head she received in childhood. Perhaps they were; but again we only have her word for it.
Whatever the cause of the brain problems, they surely weren't Tubman's fault. They weren't my fault either, though, nor yours, nor Andrew Jackson's, and they do cast a cloud of doubt over her stories.
Second problem: Tubman's friends got Sarah Bradford, a successful fiction writer, to produce Tubman's autobiographies. This was after the Civil War, but the tradition of abolitionist propaganda, whose greatest success was of course Uncle Tom's Cabin, was still alive, and Sarah Bradford likely saw herself in that tradition, as the literary heiress of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Tubman then sank into obscurity until leftist writers of the 1930s took an interest in her as part of their general critique of U.S. society, which they compared unfavorably with the new system of justice and equality being established, according to them, in the Soviet Union.
In short, the Tubman story originated with her own unreliable recollections, and was then promulgated by people all of whom had agendas.
Harriet Tubman may have been — on the scattered evidence we have, probably was — a brave and resourceful person. Still, her story belongs much more to the realms of myth and propaganda than to history.
I found this mildly amusing. And on a scale of 1 to 10, the level of my surprise is maybe 3.
Botond173
2d ago
I wonder if the "chemical weapons" this general supposedly ordered to be used in the Ukraine happen to be exactly the same sort of non-lethal tear gas that Ukrainian forces also use for the same purposes. In other words, I suspect it's the same story all over as with the landmines.
Botond173
3d ago
I’d say 1:4 or 1:5 seems likely.
There are other factors to consider.
How effective and quick is Ukrainian medical evacuation in the field in this era of combat drones?
What is the health condition of the average Ukrainian draftee/recruit? Is he more or less resilient to wounds than a 20-something Soviet soldier in WW2, for example?
How destructive is modern artillery compared to the era of the world wars?
Botond173
4d ago
Those are valid points. The claim of a ratio of 1:9 is still rather suspicious.
Botond173
9d ago
The claim that the Ukraine even had a population of almost 38 million at the start of the war (which I assume does not include the population under Russian control but nominally of Ukrainian citizenship in this particular context) is rather questionable (there has been no census since 2001). The same goes for the idea that there's only one war dead for every 9 wounded.
Botond173
9d ago
The country was reeling from the shocking, inexplicable murder of Ashling Murphy, a primary school teacher who went for a run along the Grand Canal near Tullamore, only to be brutally stabbed to death by an unknown assailant. In the week following her murder, social media was agog with insinuations or outright accusations that all Irish men were indirectly complicit in her murder; that her murder was the result of a toxic Irish rape culture which knowingly ignores, downplays or minimises male violence towards women. Both President Michael D. Higgins and then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar offered their condolences to the victim’s family. Rape crisis organisations called on the Department of Education to implement a national policy on sexual harassment and assault in schools.
Then, less than a week later, they arrested the murderer, and he turned out to be a Roma man from Slovakia named Jozef Puska.
It's a matter of prejudice and one's inability to examine or even notice it in oneself. I'm sure they felt it earnestly in their hearts as self-evident that the perpetrator is a toxic heterosexual white man, in the same way when they cannot conceive of a world where hate crimes against Asian-Americans are committed by anyone else but toxic heterosexual white men.
Botond173
10d ago
Fair enough. I thought you'll make a point about the local job market, or the perverse incentives of welfare policies.
Botond173
10d ago
E.g.: typing. Back in 1962, most professionals didn't type much themselves because they could hire a typist for a fairly low wage (mostly because that was one of the careers for young women that was generally acceptable for decades by then). That is, a professional could, instead of learning the skill himself, use some reasonable portion of his income to outsource the typing tasks. Now, every white-collar worker and many blue-collar workers are expected to do their own typing, and the typing tasks have only increased. As a result, at least 2/3rd of the population has some typing skill, and if we compare the group whose job included typing in 1962 to similar group now, the average 1962 typist would be much faster and make fewer spelling errors.
So dictation fell out of habit completely since then?
Botond173
10d ago
Indeed. One grave consequence of (mainly) the Sexual Revolution is that the women who'd objectively need marriage the most (lower-class and underclass women with high time preference) in their lives are exactly those that are least likely to marry. This has enormous social costs.
Botond173
11d ago
I'm currently dating a women who's family is the typical Fishtown resident Murray describes (She herself is a lovely girl). Her family behaves poorly. Her sisters constantly engage in borderline prostitution. They have no work.
Why are they unemployed, in your view?
Botond173
13d ago
It's a small world indeed; I responded to that comment just now. Here's the original:
Botond173
13d ago
obviously a progressive woman (less often, a man) who hates her sons (or hates her sons because they do not sufficiently hate themselves, for the perceived sake of someone else's daughters) because her peer group told her to.
This is also the kind of woman who, by genetics, is not only more likely to have teenagers that rebel against her (and have peer group influence dominate her sons just as her peer group clearly does to her right now), but to take that extremely personally.
Another aspect is that she’s very much like a fish out of water in this situation. She grew up in an era when society was already transforming culturally to what it is now, but was still running on the fumes of the crumbling patriarchy, so traditional mating norms were in force. (As another commenter observed here a couple of months ago, it doesn’t occur to normal people to spend mental energy investigating things that work.) The idea that young men would resort to looking up Youtube tutorials and whatnot just to find girlfriends is inconceivable to her. She lacks any point of reference. It all seems a bit scary.
With regard to Tate you didn’t address the most crucial factor in all of this: liberal feminists like the Reddit commenters you mentioned that are out for blood are both unwilling to and ideologically incapable of giving actionable, effective dating and sex advice to heterosexual men altogether, and thus act as competition and an alternative to the likes of Tate. (In fact, they cannot give useful advice to women either, but that’s a different issue.) The anger and hostility you see is largely the consequence of this absence. How else would they react? Whatever Tate promotes is merely a dumbed-down, cruder version of Manosphere doctrines that were expressed (mostly) online in detail 10-15 years ago, and the only reason he gained any following is that most of this content was suppressed through the usual liberal feminist tactics of cancelling, doxing, panic-mongering, threats etc., which themselves were tacit admission of the shortcoming I mentioned earlier.
On a related note I should mention that this narrative about clueless teenage boys getting radicalized online by right-wing garbage human agents of Russian subversion is also a rather popular theme on Hungarian subreddits, which are unsurprisingly leftist circlejerks but somehow manage to be even worse than similar Western circlejerks due to them radicalizing themselves through their own sense of grievance at being self-perceived ideological underdogs. We’re talking about people who absolutely despise normies (because they perceive them as right-wing) and social hierarches and prejudices (because they perceive those as right-wing and authoritarian); but whenever this subject in particular comes up they instantly turn into authoritarian normies with the usual prejudices.
Botond173
15d ago
Rhetoric is one thing, actions are another. Altogether I find it a bit of a stretch to say that Chinese foreign policy was markedly aggressive during Mao, either compared to that of the USSR or the Qing Dynasty for that matter.
Botond173
15d ago
Good point, although that memery has outlived its usefulness/relevance for years at this point, as Kamala lost the election, Biden is a lame duck and Trump isn't an interventonist. If the regime does indeed fall in the near future, it'll happen with negligible input from the US or Israel or the UK.
Botond173
17d ago
"Latchkey kids" were called as such because they had to enter the house with a key when they got home because nobody was home yet, as both parents were / the single parent was working late i.e. the kids had to spend a couple of hours on their own everyday. Neither the parents nor the grandparents were around to supervise them, as the latter usually lived somewhere distant etc. They would normally go outside to play actually, because PC games weren't around much yet, cable TV wasn't that widespread and safetyism wasn't yet the social norm. And they often carried the key around their necks to make sure it didn't get lost.
Again, I think it was a peculiar phenomenon facilitated by a combination of social factors that mostly aren't around anymore.
Botond173
17d ago
I don't think we can say that with certainty. The intervention happened when North Korea was on the verge of complete defeat and I'd be surprised to learn that it had goals more ambitious then restoring the status quo.
Botond173
17d ago
Most people neither require nor care about democracy; they want streets that are safe, low crime, affordable and decent food on the table, a youth that is disciplined and hardworking, and a feeling that their country is headed in the right direction.
How is it possible then that there are US cities with urban cores that have none of these, and yet the local population clings to their idea of democracy?
Botond173
17d ago
I find all this to be a bit far-fetched. When exactly did the Chinese Communists express any intent to unify Korea after expelling the Americans? Their intervention in the Korean War didn't go to such lengths either. We might as well say that their wildest dreams include Vladivostok. And what Russian ambitions are 'way beyond' Eastern Ukraine? Don't tell me it's Moldova of all places.
Botond173
17d ago
We can't tell how efficient the Chinese armed forces are. Their performance was surely not exactly stellar the last time they were sent into combat, between 1979-88 in the Chinese-Vietnamese border region. Their navy is pretty much an unknown entity in that regard in particular. There's nothing to suggest that they'd turn out to be more impressive than their Russian counterparts.
Also, you're comparing apples to oranges. The Russian Federation exists on the ruins of an empire that lost her entire periphery in 1991. This never happened to Communist China. Of course they're going to appear to be more peaceful.
The relevant fact is that Turner was provably the real leader of a real slave rebellion.
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