Month: January 2019

Why So Much Anger and Resentment?

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2018–The Year of Living Hatefully is the title of a recent post by Roger Simon:

Practically no one was happy. Or if they were, they didn’t show it. All they wanted to do was vilify the opposition or even their neighbors.  Democrats hating Republicans (see the new movie “Vice”) and vice versa were just the tip of a rancid iceberg. Never Trumpers hate Trumpers and the reverse, Sanders supporters hate Beto supporters, Antifa hate the bourgeoisie, the Proud Boys hate Antifa, FOX hates CNN and MSNBC hates FOX…It goes on and on. Families and friends split from each other. People shut up at work for fear they’ll be fired. Thanksgiving is a festival of hostility, Christmas (when we’re allowed to speak its name) is only slightly better.

Roger attributes the toxic atmosphere in large part to the decline in religiousness.  I’m not convinced by that explanation; there are plenty of examples of religion as a cause of mutual hostility as well as cases where it has served as part of a cure.

One factor in the development of the toxic atmosphere, IMO, has been the cult of “self-esteem development” carried to an excess…this seems to have resulted in a large number of people who simply cannot stand challenge or disagreement.

Still, there are plenty are angry and hostile people who are old enough to have missed the era of self-esteem indoctrination.

Another factor is social media,which seems to lend itself to the formation of on-line lynch mobs, as I discussed in my post freedom, the village, and social media.

Economic fear and uncertainty surely also plays a role.  Although Roger remarks that “all this (craziness and anger) is happening in a country awash in affluence, also as almost never before, with close to full employment for all ethnic and racial groups,” it remains true that many people are highly disappointed in their failure to advance more economically, and many who feel that their children will be less-well-off than themselves.  Economic factors aside, there are also many who have been severely disappointed in their relationships and blame this disappointment in large part on society.

A friend of mine once remarked that “if someone is bitter, then he is publicly announcing that in his own eyes he is a failure.”  I thought this was a profound comment, and by that measure, there are a lot of people in America today who consider themselves to be failures.

But still, there are a lot of people who are doing very well economically, who seem to have excellent relationships/family lives, but who also have a lot of anger at a large number of their fellow Americans.

Also,  I remember something Ralph Peters wrote many years ago:

Man loves, men hate. While individual men and women can sustain feelings of love over a lifetime toward a parent or through decades toward a spouse, no significant group in human history has sustained an emotion that could honestly be characerized as love. Groups hate. And they hate well…Love is an introspective emotion, while hate is easily extroverted…We refuse to believe that the “civilized peoples of the Balkans could slaughter each other over an event that occurred over six hundred years ago. But they do. Hatred does not need a reason, only an excuse.

This also is, I think, a profound remark.  And today’s intense focus on group identities has surely led to much more viewing of people as avatars of a group, rather than individuals–making it that much easier to despise and attack them.

And a significant part of American academia is endlessly busy manufacturing new and revised group identities, and stirring up resentments based thereon.

Do you agree with Roger that 2018 was the most Hateful year in recent history?  If so, what do you see as the primary causes and the potential remedies, if any?

 

Robert Kaplan agrees with me on Afghanistan

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Today, Robert Kaplan wrote a piece in the New York Times saying we need to get out of Afghanistan.

The decision by President Trump to withdraw 7,000 of the roughly 14,000 American troops left in Afghanistan, possibly by summer, has raised new concerns about his impulsive behavior, especially given his nearly simultaneous decision to pull out all American forces from Syria against the advice of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. But the downsizing of the Afghan mission was probably inevitable. Indeed, it may soon be time for the United States to get out of the country altogether.

Naturally, the anti-Trump lines are obligatory in the NY Times. He has the right decision and, of course, it is the one Trump announced but Trump hatred is a necessary ingredient in anything an author expects the Times to publish.

I have been saying this since 2009.

During Afghanistan’s golden age which consisted of the last king’s rule, the country consisted of a small civilized center in Kabul while the rest of the country existed much as it did in the time of Alexander the Great. I have reviewed Kilcullen’s Accidental Guerilla, which explains much of the Afghan war. He is not optimistic about it and neither am I. Aside from the fact that Obama is a reluctant, very reluctant, warrior here, Pakistan is a serious obstacle to success.

Today, Andy McCarthy calls our attention to an explosive editorial in Investors’ Business Daily on the links between the Taliban and Pakistan’s army and intelligence services.

it’s an open secret the Taliban are headquartered across the border in the city of Quetta, Pakistan, where they operate openly under the aegis of Pakistani intelligence — and the financial sponsorship of the Saudis.

Of course, Osama bin Laden was living in Pakistan and sheltered by them. Kaplan does have a few crazy ideas.

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Industrial Electrification and the Technological Illiteracy of the US Army Air Corps Tactical School 1920-1940

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This blog post on “Industrial Electrification and the Technological Illiteracy of the U.S. Army Air Tactical School 1920-1940” marks the new year with a departure from past history columns I’ve written for Chicagoboyz in that it is exploring a theme I refer to as “The Bane of Technologically Illiterate Military Leaders.”[1] As such, it will not be fully fleshed out with sources and notes.  Consider it a ‘first draft’ of an article I’ll post later.

The issue with ‘Technologically Illiterate Military Leaders‘ I’ll be exploring in this and future articles is that such leaders tend to make the same classes of mistakes over and over again.  And when those military leaders reach flag rank on the bones of theories and doctrines that fail the test of combat through their technological illiteracy.  They then bury the real reasons why those doctrines failed behind walls of jargon and classification to avoid accountability for those failures.

Where you can see this pattern most easily in the historical record is with the US Army Air Corp Tactical School (ACTS) “Industrial Web” theory of strategic bombing  and it’s inability to understand what the changes that industrial electrification caused had meant to this theory.  The “Industrial Web”  theory stated there were “choke points” in an industrial economy which bombing would cause a disproportionate reduction in enemy nation’s weapons production supporting total war.[2]

Figure 1 — This is an example of early industrial age direct mechanical power transmission that was replaced by small electric motor powered tooling in the 1920 to 1940 time period. The US Army’s Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) early 1930’s era “Industrial Web” theory of strategic bombing was built upon this technological paradigm. Many of the failures of the World War 2 Combined Bomber Offensive can be laid at the feet of Western military leaders illiteracy of what the move to electric motor power, and away from this technology, meant to the vulnerabilities of industrial economies. Source: Wikipedia

On the surface, this was a logical sounding intellectual construct.  In practice, it failed miserably at places like the 14 October 1943 second Schweinfurt raid on German ball bearing factories and the  Yawata Strike,  the start of the early B-29 campaign on Japanese Coke ovens.

The unavoidable, in hindsight, issue for USAAF leaders trained in the Air Corps Tactical School in the period between 1920 and 1940 was that it spanned the change in industrial infrastructure from steam engine, line shaft and power belt to electric motor powered mass production.[3]  Thus the ACTS theorists had a fundamentally flawed understanding of industrial economies vulnerability to aerial bombing going into World War 2 (WW2) because they were technologically illiterate regards the radical change industrial electrification caused.

This flawed understanding was that roof damage in a factory with line shaft and drive belt power transmission — whether steam or electric driven — stops all production until the roof-mounted line shaft is re-seated or replaced.  This was not the case for electric motor delivered power located on the factory floor.  The technological illiteracy here was not seeing the fact that electric motors fundamentally disassociated factory production processes from factory physical structure. [4]

The basic idea that ACTS theorists had at the time was that their “Industrial Web” was a serial system where every component had to work to produce an effect.  Thus ACTS theorists fundamentally believed in the “weak link” theory of reliability, rather than the need to obliterate all key components that a parallel, or complex serial/parallel system, with redundancy required.   The point failure weakness of line shaft and drive belt industrial infrastructure fit this “serial system with a weak link” belief system of ACTS theorists to a tee. [5]

So when you read wartime USAAF bomb damage assessment reports from the WW2  Combined Bombing Campaign giving such and such percentages of factory roof’s destroyed being used as a means of determining whether production there was knocked out.  You are seeing a “weak link” short hand based upon line shaft power transmission infrastructure assumptions.

When you read later post-war bomb damage surveys reading  “…that machines and machine tools were damaged far less severely than factory structures,” you are seeing a USAAF staffer dodging those pre-WW2 “Industrial Web/Weak Link” line shaft infrastructure assumptions by not using the term at all.

This sort of language shift to hide real world meanings with jargon, thus neatly avoiding accountability for failure in combat, is one of the classic ‘poker tells’ in researching ‘Technologically Illiterate Military Leaders‘.

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