The history of the Fourth Reich

From the New Statesman:  a rather fascinating review of a book that deals with the history of the Nazi idea of a Third (and now Fourth) Reich:  and it's fairly complicated.

First surprise:

...the concept of the “Third Reich” is more strange than it at first appears. For one thing, the term itself was effectively banned by Hitler in the lead-up to the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.

The reason is hard to pin down. Rosenfeld suggests that Hitler found its Christological associations unattractive and, moreover, misleading. The Führer did not want to make false promises about delivering any kind of regime associated with peace and world brotherhood when he was planning to realise it through war, conquest, extermination and sacrifice. Hitler instructed the German press to use other formulations such as the “Germanic Empire of the German Nation” (Germanisches Reich Deutscher Nation) and the “Greater German Empire” (Grossgermanisches Reich).

Second surprise:

A more intriguing explanation for the Nazis’ retirement of the “Third Reich” was that they were already contending with a barrage of counter-propaganda about a coming “Fourth Reich” by the anti-Nazi resistance. This is where Rosenfeld’s book becomes truly revelatory, for it seems perplexing that anti-Nazis would latch on to the concept of a “Reich” at all. But this is what many German Social Democrats in exile did. The former member of the German parliament Georg Bernhard and fellow SPD intellectuals went so far as to write a “Draft of a Constitution for the Fourth Reich” that would come about after the fall of Hitler. The Fourth Reich, its constitution declared, would be dedicated to global democracy and the equality of peoples.  

Third surprise (and perhaps the biggest, since I have never been to Indonesia):

The Fourth Reich is the latest in a grand series of works that Rosenfeld has devoted to the afterlife of Nazism. But towards the end of the book he makes one small assumption that strikes me as opening up the possibility of a further volume, about the Nazi afterlife in Asia. “Germany’s popularity”, he writes, “did not last” after the financial crisis of 2008. This may be true for Europe, but it is hardly the case globally, where, especially in south and south-east Asia, Germany is regularly ranked as the favourite country.

What is disconcerting for any European traveller to Indonesia, for instance, is not merely that people equate Germany with perfection – automobiles, appliances and football – but that Nazi prowess is also admired as an example of German excellence. That there was a genocide is not particularly notable for people who have lived through one of their own, but German nationalism coupled with industrialism and the apparent bounty of its socialism draws admirers. The news-stands of Jakarta are full of magazines devoted to U-boats alone. At the Soldatenkaffee in Bandung, couples order “Nazi goreng”, below the German heraldic eagle and a wall decorated with a slogan that reads: “We are Socialists, we are enemies of the capitalist economic system…” In a country where to be on the left is still forbidden, it’s at least cool to quote to Hitler.

So the wingnuts who have convinced themselves that the Nazis were always and in every sense socialists can go take comfort in some nutjob's cafe in Jakarta.   If only they would go and stay there.

Sums it up well

Some Christchurch commentary of note

At the Washington Post:   The Racist Theory that Underlies Terrorism in New Zealand and the Trump Presidency.

An extract:

Trump is not to blame for the tragedy in Christchurch. But, as an editorial in The Washington Post noted, there isn’t much daylight between the “garden-variety racism” of Tarrant’s manifesto and the far-right nativism at times espoused by Trump and his advisers.

My colleagues pointed to the particular emphasis Tarrant seemed to place on the “great replacement” theory, a belief popular among the West’s far right that white populations face “genocide” as a result of declining birthrates and mass immigration. In his manifesto, Tarrant pointed to the formative impact of a trip to France in 2017, where he was disturbed by the number of Muslims he saw in a midsize French town.

“As I sat there in the parking lot, in my rental car, I watched a stream of the invaders walk through the shopping centre’s front doors,” Tarrant wrote. “For every French man or woman there was double the number of invaders. I had seen enough, and in anger, drove out of the town, refusing to stay any longer in the cursed place and headed on to the next town.”

Though immigration levels have dropped significantly in Europe since 2015 — and though Muslims are a small minority in virtually every European country — this belief remains a virulent mobilizer of the European far right and has spread in various forms both across the Atlantic and to the Antipodes.

Renaud Camus, the polemicist whose thesis in his 2012 book “The Great Replacement” almost certainly influenced Tarrant, decried the gunman’s actions in an interview with The Washington Post. But he felt little concern over how his ideas were being interpreted by far-right politicians and proliferated in the online echo chambers where Tarrant stewed in his hatred.

“To the fact that people take notice of the ethnic substitution that is in progress in my country?” he ventured to my colleague James McAuley. “No. To the contrary.”

Camus is hardly an outlier. Former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon has invoked the writings of Jean Raspail, whose deeply racist 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints” conjured an epochal influx of swarthy migrants subsuming France. In 2015, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen urged her supporters to read the book.

And this:

As the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in a lengthy essay on American nativism, white nationalist angst over migration — whether it’s Latino arrivals at the border or the Muslims next door — hinges on tacit mainstream acceptance of the “replacement” theory: “The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration — as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion,” Serwer wrote.

A central contention of the Trumpist view on immigration, Serwer added, contends “that intrinsic human worth is rooted in national origin, and that a certain ethnic group has a legitimate claim to permanent political hegemony in the United States.”

That is, in essence, white supremacy. Trump “ought to state unambiguously that the New Zealand suspect’s ‘replacement’ ideology is an unacceptable trope in civilized discourse,” declared The Post’s editorial.

Blog becomes immortal

OK, that heading may be a slight exaggeration, but I just noticed at The Conversation that the National Library of Australia has:

....just launched its Australian Web Archive – a massive, freely accessible collection of content that provides a historical record of the development of world wide web content in Australia over more than two decades.

The new archive is a momentous achievement. Containing annual captures of all accessible pages on .au domains and dating back to 1996, it dwarfs even the the Library’s own PANDORA Web archive – a curated collection of Australian web content deemed to be of national significance by the librarians.

I believe it's the Pandora archive that chose to archive all of Catallaxy - back in the day when it still had a semblance of intellectual credibility.   

But yay, by searching the Australian Web Archive, I see that Opinion Dominion has been snapshotted quite a few times by this new archive of which I was unaware.

Immortality is mine.  (Insert Bwahahahahaha style laughter.) 

The biggest cop out

Here are the simple facts of the matter:

a. Sinclair Davidson will not ban people who comment at his blog who have been busy routinely vilifying Muslims collectively for many years.

b.  If you want to see some examples I have complained about before, use the site search bar at the side of this blog and search "Muslim Catallaxy". 

c.  The reason for his refusal to ban such comments or people is unknown.  I presume he thinks that banning them will look "un-libertarian".   This is kind of ironic, given that most of his followers, if threads are anything to go by, are actually reactionary Right wing  Conservatives who think libertarianism is a fatally flawed philosophy.   (Oh, they do like the idea that they can make rarely moderated and anonymous comments that are blatantly racist, sexist, misogynistic or just downright nutty.  That's the one aspect of libertarianism they're signed up for.  That and guns, lovely guns.)

d.  It's not as if he can't and doesn't ban people when it suits him - he has banned people in the past just for insulting him personally.  He has basically banned people for being too annoying to other commentators.

e. To state the obvious:  given the nature of the internet, there is nothing about being aggressively for free speech  that means you must personally host a site which routinely allows views you personally find "ugly"to repeatedly appear.

f.  It's no justification that he will, sometimes, personally post or comment that he thinks the anti-Muslim views on his site are going too far.

h.  He in fact maintains a forum in which the extremist views on Muslims are "normalised" by their constant repetition and frequent lack of challenge, despite them often representing extremism of the kind that appears in manifestos like that of the Christchurch killer.    



That he will not ban them shows he will take no responsibility for facilitating the promotion of those views.    He should never appear on media without being attacked for why he facilitates them.

To shrug his shoulders and say he is "not his brother's keeper", as he did in a recent comment here,  is a pathetic cop out.   


Update:  I meant to link to monty's post in 2014: Alan Moran sacked from IPA over anti-Islam tweets, in which I contributed comments puzzling over what justification a person of moderate views on Islam (like Davidson) can have for continuing to host a site like Catallaxy with threads full of  rabid anti Islamic views the IPA won't tolerate on its staff.  

Ergas and the elephant in the room

First, I am posting this after the horrible events in Christchurch today, a topic which will no doubt deserve some comment later.

But I just wanted to note Henry Ergas's column in The Australian this morning, purportedly looking at the "broader forces at work" behind the almost certain defeat of the Coalition at the coming election.  (It is very, very hard to imagine how Shorten could possibly blow an election where it seems half of the government has already resigned in disgust at its own internal divisions.)

Ergas notes how the Coalition came into power with Abbott having low approval rating, just that Rudd/Gillards was even lower due to their own shambolic internal divisions (true.)

But the rest of the column is about how the Australian electorate has moved Left, and how that's a long term problem for the Liberals.

What he doesn't seem to get into that noggin of his is that Australian's might have good reason for moving Left - because the Right's policies haven't exactly come out with the glorious results that would keep the voters happy.  

In fact, his treatment of policies is trite:

Yes, the Coalition has made more than its fair share of mistakes; nonetheless, one might have expected the prospect of a Shorten Labor government to induce more concern than it has.

Labor is, after all, committed to the largest peacetime tax rises since Federation, its energy policy threatens to convert a disaster into a catastrophe and its industrial ­relations policy risks replicating, albeit in a more benign macro­economic environment, the worst ­errors of the Whitlam years.

Each of those could have sent shivers down voters’ spines. ­Instead, they have been greeted with remarkable insouciance, even among their likely victims.

Blah blah blah:    The elephant in the room, dear Henry, dear Henry IS THAT THE COALITION HAS BEEN PARALYSED ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND (THEREFORE) ENERGY POLICY FOR 10 FREAKING YEARS.    THEY HAVE REEKED OF DISINGENUOUS CONCERN, UP TO AND INCLUDING THE CURRENT PM CARRYING COAL INTO PARLIAMENT WHILE NOW TRYING TO SELL HIMSELF AS WANTING TO MEET PARIS TARGETS.

If the Coalition wants to make a comeback, it needs to rid itself of climate change denialism.  My biggest regret about Turnbull's departure is that he did not call on the party to actually split to resolve that conflict once and for all.

Secondly, it needs to be centrist and not doggedly ideological about tax and economic policy, taking good ideas from where ever they may come; and in particular, not follow the poisonous populist corruption of the Right wing seen in the US which has become simply an intellectual embarrassment.  

So, yeah,  count me underwhelmed by his analysis, again.

In your own world

There's a MIT Technology Review article about this quantum experiment, but it sometimes throws up a paywall now, which is annoying.

So I'll go with this article instead:

A Wild New Quantum Physics Experiment Suggests That Objective Reality May Not Exist After All

It's all to do with the Wigner's friend thought experiment (now turned into an actual experiment). 

The actual arXiv paper is available at this link.  The abstract:

The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them. In quantum mechanics, the objectivity of observations is not so clear, most dramatically exposed in Eugene Wigner's eponymous thought experiment where two observers can experience fundamentally different realities. While observer-independence has long remained inaccessible to empirical investigation, recent no-go-theorems construct an extended Wigner's friend scenario with four entangled observers that allows us to put it to the test. In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we here realise this extended Wigner's friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations. This result lends considerable strength to interpretations of quantum theory already set in an observer-dependent framework and demands for revision of those which are not.

Actually, it's worth downloading the paper and reading the discussion at the end.

Modulo the potential loopholes and accepting the pho-tons’ status as observers, the violation of inequality (2)implies that at least one of the three assumptions of freechoice, locality, and observer-independent facts must fail.Since abandoning free choice and locality might not re-solve the contradiction [5], one way to accommodate ourresult is by proclaiming that “facts of the world” canonly be established by a privileged observer—e.g., onethat would have access to the “global wavefunction” inthe many worlds interpretation [17] or Bohmian mechan-ics [18]. Another option is to give up observer indepen-dence completely by considering facts only relative toobservers [19], or by adopting an interpretation such asQBism, where quantum mechanics is just a a tool thatcaptures an agent’s subjective prediction of future mea-surement outcomes [20]. This choice, however, requiresus to embrace the possibility that different observers ir-reconcilably disagree about what happened in an exper-iment.

No nudes Buddha

Just one of those things one stumbles across on the internet:  an explanation as to why, despite India even back then having a tradition of asceticism involving nudity and little care for personal hygiene, Buddhism is not associated with such practices:

The Buddha mentioned that before his enlightenment he went naked which have led some to speculate that he was a follower of Jainism for at least some time (M.I,77). The âjãvakas and several other sects went naked and the Ekasàñaka ascetics only wore a small cloth over their genitals. Nakedness together with tearing the hair out, never cutting the hair and nails, allowing the hair become matted and never washing, were all believed to show an admirable detachment from the world.....

The Buddha made it a rule that monks should never go naked, even within their private quarters (Vin.II,121). He said: `Nakedness is unbecoming, unsuitable, improper, unworthy of an ascetic, not allowable and not to be done'(Vin.I,305). He objected to it on two grounds. The first was because like all austerities or surface changes, nudity does not lead to significant inner change. He said: `Not nakedness nor matted hair, not mud nor fasting, not lying on the ground, being unwashed or squatting on the heels will purify one who has not passed beyond doubt' (Dhp.141). He also objected to nudity because it contravened the norms of polite society for no good reason. Lady Visàkhà once saw some nuns bathing naked and commented: `Nakedness in women is ugly, abhorrent and objectionable'(Vin.I,293), which seems to have been the general opinion at that time. The Buddha wanted his monks and nuns to abide by the normal standards of decorum and good manners, the better to be able to communicate the Dhamma to others. He was also anxious that his monks and nuns should be distinct from those of other sects, inwardly but also outwardly. Because many of these other ascetics were either completely or partly naked or wore whatever they liked, the Buddha stipulated that his ordained disciples should wear a distinct and easily identifiable robe. 

 Sounds kind of sensible to me.  

Late summers

Brisbane did not have a terribly hot summer during December and January, but I had been commenting to people that my recollection seemed to be that high temperatures have in recent years been coming in late summer - February.

This year, it seems later still - record setting 41 degree days just west of Brisbane in mid March. 

Combined with the record breaking warm winter days in parts of Europe in February, this feels somewhat climate change-y to me.

Design issues

Slate writes that this may well be the cause of the Boeing 737 Max problem:

To maintain its lead, Boeing had to counter Airbus’ move. It had two options: either clear off the drafting tables and start working on a clean-sheet design, or keep the legacy 737 and polish it. The former would cost a vast amount—its last brand-new design, the 787, cost $32 billion to develop—and it would require airlines to retrain flight crews and maintenance personnel. 

Instead, it took the second and more economical route and upgraded the previous iteration. Boeing swapped out the engines for new models, which, together with airframe tweaks, promised a 20 percent increase in fuel efficiency. In order to accommodate the engine’s larger diameter, Boeing engineers had to move the point where the plane attaches to the wing. This, in turn, affected the way the plane handled. Most alarmingly, it left the plane with a tendency to pitch up, which could result in a dangerous aerodynamic stall. To prevent this, Boeing added a new autopilot system that would pitch the nose down if it looked like it was getting too high. According to a preliminary report, it was this system that apparently led to the Lion Air crash. 

If Boeing had designed a new plane from scratch, it wouldn’t have had to resort to this kind of kludge. It could have designed the airframe for the engines so that the pitch-up tendency did not exist. As it was, its engineers used automation to paper over the aircraft’s flaws. Automated systems can go a long way toward preventing the sorts of accidents that arise from human fecklessness or inattention, but they inherently add to a system’s complexity. When they go wrong, they can act in ways that are surprising to an unprepared pilot. That can be dangerous, especially in high-stress, novel situations. Air France 447 was lost in 2009 after pilots overreacted to minor malfunctions and became confused about what to expect from the autopilot.

The article notes that Boeing and Airbus basically split the commerical aircraft market between them.   Yet there was talk over the last few years of China trying to become a player too.  I wonder how that's going?   Oh - not so well:

Why China is no closer to rivalling Boeing or Airbus

At the risk of sounding a tad 4Chan...

I'm making my way through Umbrella Academy (on Netflix), and but after a promising first episode, the pace is too often dragging.     

In particular, I find it really starts to get more tedious whenever the two "sisters" are featuring heavily.  I realised this last night - the male members of this superhero family are all distinctive and interesting in their own oddball ways, and really make the females (especially mopey face Ellen Page) seem very dull in comparison.

Of course, it will probably turn out that Vanya will have a secret power that is, like, really powerful. But gee, she is written as a dull character.  As is her sister.

On the other hand, I am amused to see that culture warrior-ing against Captain Marvel has gotten nowhere, with the movie probably already over $500 million within days of release.  I might go see it, even though reviews are a little mixed.  As with all silly superhero stuff, my main question is:  is it funny enough?

Professor under attack

I see that Sinclair Davidson noted in his Open Forum yesterday that people have complained to his tertiary institution about various things:

That makes the complaints sound very ill founded, yet in the bigger picture, he deserves to be pilloried at every opportunity for running a blog full of offensive swill. 

Update:  typical example - from today, aviation expert "Tom":

Boeing’s mistake is selling its aeroplanes to Third World airlines employing Third World trash as pilots 

 Stand proud, Sinclair.  Stand proud.  

Sounds interesting

A very short review at Nature:

War Doctor
David Nott Picador (2019)
For more than 25 years, surgeon David Nott has lived periodically “in a liminal zone where most people have neither been nor want to go”: fields of war from Afghanistan to Bosnia. His memoir interweaves bold surgical feats on these sojourns in hell with his own psychological journey, a chronicle equally soaked in blood and insight. Now co-founder of a foundation training other physicians in this specialized work, Nott remains an important witness to the haunting human price of that modern triad: geopolitical instability, poor governance and ever more powerful weaponry.

Update:  an interesting, more detailed, review of the book appears in American New Statesman, by another author surgeon (who I think I heard interviewed on the ABC once.)  It opens as follows:

Most doctors do not want to be surgeons – indeed, many view them with a slight distaste, as a necessary evil. Surgeons are attracted to surgery by blood, by the excitement of operating and by the power over patients that comes with it, as well as by the technical challenges of the handwork involved. It is a power to help and to heal, but as with so many psychological truths, it is two-sided – the power can be attractive in its own right. All surgeons have to find a balance between these competing poles of altruism and egotism.

As with climate change denialism

David Frum tweeted this the other day:

and lots of people in comments noted that the same can be said about climate change denialism.  It gives them a thrill of being in the exclusive club of insiders who really know what's going on.

Is "paranoia" too strong a word for it?   Probably not, when the wingnut Right whips themselves into a frenzy about SOCIALISM and how its behind climate change; not to mention their idea that a vast network of scientists just deliberately and fraudulently adjust the temperature record to prove that climate change is real.   Firm belief in wildly improbable, or repeatedly disproved, conspiracy is paranoia.

Oh look - even Sinclair Davidson wants Labor to win the Federal election