Attacks on Churchill…from the Right. This sort of thing feeds the same “aren’t we just awful” mindset that we see so much of from the Left.
Student expectations for careers versus actual outcomes.
Trump, Peggy Noonan, and the Old Guard.
How the Past envisaged our Present.
Martin Gurri on the importance of free speech: The Great American Debate Begins Again. Indeed, a lot of people seem to reject the whole idea of debate and of adversary proceedings in courts: they want an Authority to tell them what is true.
Related: Obama’s messaging machine.
Do graphic design and aesthetics affect the credibility of political communications?
Propellers versus paddle wheels: a case study in the introduction of a disruptive technology.
Jet engine turbine blades and single-crystal casting. Interesting that this sort of thing is rarely referred to as ‘tech’ by the media.
What are the health effects of replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs?
To be devils advocate britain won two wars but germany now runs europe freedom of speech is a memory in the uk, on certain topics uk history and traditions are being erased Communism was allowed to run rampage in Eastern Europe
(Thats a big theme of coopers)
Looking with a long lens thats what some see
Thanks for sharing Strom’s piece, re: Noonan, that’s a good one.
If I may be somewhat cynical. There is a link between that and Kisin’s as it applies to the world of “public intellectuals.” If social media gives everyone a platform then the competition for views is as vicious as ever. The way to do that is to say or do something that makes you stand out from the crowd so that you pile up likes, retweets, views, and invites to podcasts.
Strom points out the life cycle of Noonan. She was a speechwriter who worked more than 40 years ago and has had her WSJ column for 25. She’s clearly good with the word, but the reason she keeps her column after all these years is, ummm…why? That’s the question Strom asks and somewhat answers, not because she has has particular illuminating takes on today so much as she represents a point of view, She is in part a cipher, a former high priestess of Reagan and then later the Bushoisie, you read her to know what the people who she fronts for thinks. She keeps her column for much the same way “Nancy” and “Blondie” kept their spots on the Comics page long after they stopped being funny
Tucker?
I’m not sure if he is playing the “hero goes on a journey” sincerely or just finding outrageous things to say to build his brand as a brave truth-talker,. Keep in mind that in the world of public intellectualism you don’t need everyone even just a majority to like you, you just need your own constituency.
So the the ironic thing about Strom and Kisin is that they are public intellectuals…. talking about other public intellectuals. If I simply took what Kisin wrote, if I knew nothing about the context, it would seem that his beef with Tucker isn’t so much about what he (Tucler) said about Churchill is that he dared to take on Churchill in the first place, that he dared to question the gods of the city.
Personally I think Churchill made the right decision in 1940 to keep fighting Hitler. Churchill was not only a man of Empire but also a descendant of Marlbourough and therefore by genetic code understood that Britain, historically, could never allow a single power to dominate the European continent.
Tucker, in his attempts to be contrarian, often comes off as foolish being led like a schoolboy by the likes of Cooper. However Kisin in his desire to play the hatchet man makes a key error of his own which is to ask was Churchill’s decision to keep fighting in 1940, and the economic devastation it led to, connected in some way to the position Britain is in today?
Is there anyone who would deny that Britain’s involvement in the 1914 European great war was a major reason for her subsequent decline? Yet that was done for the same primary reason as its intervention in 1939, to prevent Germany from dominating Europe. Yet Britain never recovered from WW II, except for a brief bobbing to the surface in the Thatcher years; in the post-war years it turned from Empire to the NHS and decided to commit national suicide first by entering the EC and then through mass immigration. Would it be fair to ask in 2025, even if you came to the same conclusion, whether maybe there was a third way? Another path besides what Churchill chose?
A key tenet of strategic thinking is that of leverage, to not be forced into a binary choice which the mark of strategic blunder. Any account of Churchill written in the mid-21st Century should look to interpret the decisions of May/June 1940 outside of that binary choice.
Btw this is not simply something of historical interest. We are faced today with an imminent war with China and the ghost of Churchill, his arguments against appeasement, and his stand against tyranny in 1940 loom large. We better get it right.
Kisin doesn’t address that but instead clutches his pearls in horror. In much the same way as Tucker and Noonan, he is fighting the same battle of maintaining his place and reputation by accusing others of blasphemy.
Of course Churchill should be reevaluated, everyone should reevaluated every generation or so. Churchill was a man and a hero, but not a legend, and we should not be afraid to fully engage those have negative things to say. To not do so, is how we are in the disastrous times we are in today.
Btw, Kiisin should (as we should all) be wary of throwing stones while in glass houses. Leave aside the pearl clutching and the willingness to adopt strategic myopia in order to punish blasphemy. Quoting Navajo, a fairly obscure non-Western stone age culture to support one of the great defenders of western civilization? You don’t have to be from Arizona to know that’s the mark of a poseur and a bully
Kisin is clever noonan is not and klein is ‘not even wrong’ so is his brother from another brother yglesias the hydras of the journolist
The career stuff is interesting. That the expectations of the young and enthusiastic are not always realistic does not surprise. I would point out that you can be an artist, writer or teacher without that being your paying gig. There’s a lot of good stuff being done by people for whom it is not “the day job”.
Many, many years ago I worked for a company whose primary product was making depleted uranium penetrators for the US military. They also manufactured a variety of powdered metals. The process was surprisingly simple: rotate a metal bar inside a drum and apply an arch to the end of the spinning rod. The melted metal spun off and cooled as it fell to the bottom of the drum. The faster the rotation the smaller the granularity of the drops. These metals were used in a variety of applications including in the manufacture of jet engine turbine blades. This company did not manufacture finished products, only the powdered metals.
I understand the the turbine blades were made by putting the powdered metal into a mold and then heating the mold to “bake” the metal in to its final form. This produced a more uniform metal than smelting and pouring the molten metal into the form.