Good Articles of 2024
These are not articles published in 2024, but articles that I read in 2024 that I like. They aren’t in any particular order. The original list has the Also-Rans too, and links to previous years’ lists.
The OSS's Simple Sabotage Field Manual: "(11) General Interference with Organizations and Production," (1944) on disrupting organizations by things like making meetings go too long and not decide anything.
(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to, expedite decisions.
(2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible - never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
"My Correct Views on Everything: A Rejoinder to Edward Thompson's `Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski'," Leszek Kolakowski (1974).
We want a society with a large autonomy of small communities, do we not? And we want central planning in the economy. Let us try to think now how both work together. We want technical progress and we want perfect security for people; let us look closer how both could be combined. We want industrial democracy and we want efficient management: do they work well together? Of course they do, in the leftist heaven everything is compatible and everything settled, lamb and lion sleep in the same bed. Look at the horrors of the world and see how easily we can get rid of them once we make a peaceful revolution toward the new socialist logic. The Middle East war and Palestinian grievances? Of course, this is the result of capitalism, just let us make the revolution and the question is settled. Pollution? Of course, no problem at all, just let the new proletarian state take over the factories and no pollution any more. Traffic jams ? This is because capitalists do not care a damn about human comfort, just give us power (in fact, this is a rather good point, in socialism we have far fewer cars and correspondingly fewer traffic jams). There is such a simple answer to everything and, moreover, the same answer to everything!
"Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism," CS Lewis speech to seminarians (1959).
The undermining of the old orthodoxy has been mainly the work of divines engaged in New Testament criticism. The authority of experts in that discipline is the authority in deference to whom we are asked to give up a huge mass of beliefs shared in common by the early Church, the Fathers, the Middle Ages, the Reformers, and even the nineteenth century. I want to explain what it is that makes me skeptical about this authority. Ignorantly skeptical, as you will all too easily see. But the scepticism is the father of the ignorance. It is hard to persevere in a close study when you can work up no prima facie confidence in your teachers. First then, whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgement, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading. It sounds a strange charge to bring against men who have been steeped in those books all their lives. But that might be just the trouble. A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of New Testament texts and of other people's studies of them, whose literary experience of those texts lacks any standard of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genial experience of literature in general, is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious thing about them. If he tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour; not how many years he has spend on that Gospel.
"Messing with Texas," Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight.com (2009).
Technically speaking, Texas does not have the right to divide itself up into five new states. Rather, it can spawn as many as four new states; whatever is left over would be called ‘Texas’, although for clarity I refer to this region as ‘New Texas’. This portion of the state gets to keep the Texas moniker because it contains the current state capital, Austin, and because it is in the middle of Texas’ present territory. However, it would actually the smallest, area-wise, of the five ‘new’ states, at about 25,000 square miles. New Texas would, however, be a swing state, its eight electoral votes in play as Democrats fought to turn out enough votes in Austin and the Hispanic portions of San Antonio to fend off a heavy Republican advantage in the suburban and rural portions of Hill Country.
"A Guide to Talking Politics at the Thanksgiving Table; Keeping silent is the surest way to remain ignorant," Bill Frezza, Forbes (2012).
Remaining silent in the face of a string of progressive inanities ending with the question, Dont you agree? is nearly impossible. A friendly smile and a simple no never seem to suffice. The room grows quiet as if someone just discovered a whiskey salesman in the middle of a temperance convention. Heads turn to the alpha dog, wondering whether he picked up the scent. He sizes you up before he speaks, gathering his audience to deliver a crushing rebuke, sure of the admiring glances that will be his as soon as he puts you in your place.
Twitter thread on "Shape and Drape" in clothes, by Derek Guy, @dieworkwear (2024).
(1) Try to wear a jacket. Or find ways to layer
(2) Pay attention to the complex construction of clothes
(3) Don't assume everything has to be slim-fit
(4) Think about outfits as shapes
(5) Pay attention to how fabric drapes
"The Heresy of Christian Buddhism: Modern Christianity has become infected with Buddhist ideas," by The Social Pathologist, in Aaron Renn's Substack (2024).
Any form of assertion, strength, self-improvement or force would be seen negatively in this kenotic schema, and it’s no surprise that traditional masculinity with its close association to the former attributes would be foreign to this line of thought. Many commentators have spoken of the apparent feminisation of Christianity but they have noted are the effects and not the cause, since what we’re are actually observing is the “Buddhisation” of Christianity resulting in the worship of God in an apparently feminine submissive mode. By its influence, Christianity becomes a celebration of self-abasement, non-resistance and pathological altruism, where sensible actions to preserve the self and assert the truth of Christianity are seen negatively.
“The 7 Tribes of Intellect," James Thompson (2013).
These are the next 20% of the population in terms of ability. They would be 2,000 citizens in the town of 10,000 inhabitants. Learning is somewhat faster, and achievements are of better quality. Learning varies from the slow pace, simple materials and careful supervision already mentioned previously, to very explicit, hands-on training. They tend to credulity, belief in god and superstition. They can locate the intersection of two streets on a map, identify two features in a newspaper sports story, perhaps calculate the total cost of purchases listed in a catalogue, and draw inferences from two identifiable facts and deal with some distractors.
Charles Murray, "Aztecs vs. Greeks" (2007).
Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, “I can’t do this.” Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire."
“Fragmented Future: Multiculturalism Doesn’t Make Vibrant Communities but Defensive Ones," Steve Sailer, The American Conservative (2024).
Putnam couldn’t cite any mistakes of fact, just a failure to accentuate the positive. It was “almost criminal,” Putnam grumbled, that Lloyd had not sufficiently emphasized the spin that he had spent five years concocting. Yet considering the quality of Putnam’s talking points that Lloyd did pass on, perhaps the journalist was being merciful in not giving the professor more rope with which to hang himself. For example, Putnam’s line—“What we shouldn’t do is to say that they [immigrants] should be more like us. We should construct a new us”—sounds like a weak parody of Bertolt Brecht’s parody of Communist propaganda after the failed 1953 uprising against the East German puppet regime: “Would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”
"This Sceptered Isle," Joshua Trevino, Armas (2024).
The Home Secretary appeared on the BBC and reassured viewers that Britain remains a free-speech society, while presiding over the expedited arrests, trials, and convictions of those who spoke wrongly. A father of small children got more than three years for a tweet. A middle-aged woman in Cheshire had her arrest announced by local authorities: she posted incorrect information on Facebook. The list is extensive and growing, each destruction of a wrongthink-posting nobody’s life amplified by the regime pour encourager les autres. The 1381 rebellion of English peasants under Wat Tyler ended with the victorious Richard II, having prevailed in part through a double-cross of the credulous rebels, sneering to them that “villeins ye are still, and villeins ye shall remain,” and this is still the message of the regime in 2024.
"The Democrats’ Insanity Defense; Republican Activists Say They Have to Water Down the Reality of Their Opponents’ Agenda in Focus Groups. ‘They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.‘" Tablet, Park MacDougald (2024).
The same GOP staffer, who is currently working on a competitive congressional race, told me that one problem his campaign regularly faces is that aspects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy. “When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it,” he said. “They are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.”