One in a Competitive Game Can't Fairly Set the Rules: Dissecting the Dishonesty of a YouTube Historian, Sally Paine
A consistent problem in Politics, Academia, Culture
I hate the term “history buff.” It’s a phrase that feels like a backhanded compliment. You’re a ‘buff’ in the same way that National Public Radio refers to an excellent artist outside of the elitist gallery system as ‘competent in folk art.’
It’s the sneering elitism barely acknowledging your presence. It’s the begrudging admission that your meager offerings can no longer be ignored as gauche.
The snide indifference of the phrase ‘petit bourgeoise’ comes to mind here.
If life is a bit of a struggle against your fellow man, to get ahead, to make money, to get attention, then this attitude feels like a bit of a cheat.
It’s a cheat because it’s the importation of fake rules, it’s a way of saying “I’m so avant garde and sophisticated that these competitors of mine are doing something worthy, but oh by the way they’re still worthless.”
Modern academics are a very similar elitist and insular lot. There aren’t very many of them, they are mostly dying off, their books aren’t read, their cultural impact is waning. But they pride themselves on that doctorate even though there are many other doctorates, even though only about half of those graduating with a PhD end up in any kind of teaching role.
I once sat on a hiring committee for a history department for a year at a top100 school. It was illuminating. This was a quarter century ago, but the standards they applied were very… coded. It had very little to do with merit, while they wanted a certain meritorious minimum, the rest of the decision was pure power politics. They picked whomever would advance the agenda.
That experience has permanently jaundiced my view of institutions, I’ll admit. I’ll never think that a group of human beings objectively apply themselves to choose whomever is most worthy, who might do the job the best. The considerations for friendships, politics, ideology, are otherwise too powerful and covertly persuasive.
And so if academia is this political, then why would we submit our youth to this brainwashing camp and go into indentured servitude for a decade or more for the privilege?
Most normal people are slowly figuring out that college is mostly a debt scam where white collar kids put themselves into debt slavery for 10-20 years so that they can be low-life degenerates for four years. The rationalizations are typically:
“I went to college for the experiences…”
“I went to university for the networking opportunities…”
“I could have learned on my own but the college experience is about muh socialization…”
The flaw in that mindset reminds me of the most epic line from 1999’s “Office Space” at the end of this exchange:
But college is critical to unlocking elite status. It’s the way for the youth of America to permanently signal themselves as part of the accepted elites. Academia is populated by people who approve or disapprove America’s children as either acceptably smart enough or not. They have claimed this status because they have elite status. They have elite status because they self-appropriate it to themselves from their in-group.
The most powerful institution the Communists ever compromised to this end was Harvard Law.
Anyway, it’s all a lot of smoke and mirrors as it relates to their actual worthiness.
But that self-appropriated status then allows them to arrogantly dismiss any controversies that the system doesn’t want spoken. They do this to preserve their status as defenders of the status quo. The system rewards them with more status for debunking controversies that might threaten the integrity of the political order.
People often think history is boring because they don’t realize they’re only reading the boring academics who are being boring by design.
This brings me to a faddish academic of the moment: Sarah C.M. Paine, aka “Sally” to her friends apparently.
She reeks through the computer screen of unbridled arrogance.
All of us who have been to college or through graduate education know this person. There are clones of Sally Paine throughout the university system.
She teaches “Grand Strategy” and has had a very privileged life as she developed the pedigree to support such lofty research aims.
Clearly Sally is no military general but from her titles you would expect her to be a military genius. Sally’s isn’t slumming it at Ball State in Muncie or at Ozarks Community College in Springfield, she’s living it up at the Naval War College on the east coast for the past 20 years.
On some level: Good for her.
I have a hard time explaining why I dislike this person so much.
Her clips online and her interviews get served up in my social media algorithms. For some reason I can’t escape this person. She dismisses the isolationists and blames them for the Second World War. She lionizes Franklin Roosevelt. She defends Roosevelt’s record at Yalta. She defends Roosevelt against penetration by Communist espionage agents. She has the most bland, blase, staid, takes on everything related to American history.
Her takes are ‘mid’ as the kids would say.
She is a living middle school history textbook.
What’s also frustrating is that she’s a historian of Imperial Japan and naval power constantly weighing in on American politics.
She’s a militant academic defender of the status quo. She represents the physical manifestation of the mainstream narrative. She takes all of these impossible and irreconciliable facts and still tries to weave them together as a coherent narrative for the masses.
I asked ChatGPT to give me Sally Paine’s unique insights. Yes, I realize this is weaponizing large language models to effectuate my asshole tendencies, but also admit that you’re somewhat curious to see what it barfs out. Here you go:
Maritime Strategy as a Lens for Global Power – Paine argues that understanding naval strategy is essential for grasping the broader geopolitical shifts of the modern era. She places heavy emphasis on how maritime power shaped the rise and fall of nations, particularly in East Asia.
China’s Maritime and Continental Divide – She has explored how China’s strategic thinking is historically divided between its maritime and continental concerns. While most historical studies of China focus on its land-based threats (Mongols, Russians, etc.), Paine highlights how naval power (or the lack thereof) shaped its vulnerabilities, particularly during the Opium Wars and its conflicts with Japan.
Japan’s Strategic Culture and Imperial Expansion – Paine provides an in-depth analysis of Japan’s approach to imperialism and military strategy, arguing that its maritime expansionism was both a reaction to Western encroachment and an effort to secure resources. She highlights how Japan’s naval victories (e.g., the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War) were critical in reshaping global perceptions of Asian military power.
Comparative Imperialism – She compares the approaches of different empires (British, Chinese, Japanese, Russian) and argues that their maritime policies often dictated their success or failure. Her work often challenges conventional Western narratives that overemphasize land warfare at the expense of naval history.
The Opium Wars and Unequal Treaties – Paine offers a detailed examination of the Opium Wars, framing them not just as a story of Western aggression but as a key moment in China’s long-term strategic failure to adapt to a world dominated by maritime powers.
The Russo-Japanese War as a Global Turning Point – She emphasizes that this war was not just a regional conflict but a significant moment in world history, reshaping global views on Asian military power and altering the balance of power in East Asia.
In sum: 1) Naval power important, 2) China’s lack of a navy had an impact on it, 3) Japan’s navy was an effort to secure resources, 4) Naval power important, 5) China had a hard time because it didn’t have a navy, 6) the Russo-Japanese war was important.
Going through Paine’s writings reminds of the key line of Pacino yelling at Albert in 1995’s “Heat”:
According to ChatGPT there are 20,610 academics teaching history at the postsecondary level in America. So why focus so much on this one?
Other than the fact I’ve always hated Wednesday Addams that is.
These are the fake and weak academics who are too cowardly to stake out challenging positions, who ensure that the masses remain ignorant of certain historical controversies. This is the history establishment.
These are our modern mythmakers, in the flesh.
To them, there are no controversies, there are only the Gods of the Copybook Headings.
They come out like little academic court jesters to do a little dance and then do this magic show to encourage people to never question the simplistic stupidities that they read in most secondary histories of any period.
Every once in a while you get to see their reasoning for dismissing other authors though. It’s always enlightening. And it illustrates the basic principle about why someone engaged in a competitive activity should never be allowed to set the rules of the contest.
Because they are going to set the rules massively in their favor. If they can get a competitive edge, they are going to use it here. By their very nature they are going to abuse this process and make the rules unfair.
When I was a kid I remember it being drilled into me that one should be objective and fair in all of these settings. It was a critical point that no one should abuse the power to set standards and rules. But something changed in the 90s when people stopped trying to do this, where every pretense of objectivity went out the window.
This was one of society’s minor value changes, and it was not for the better. It’s easy and convenient to blame the boomers, maybe they are responsible, but this attitude shift, a ‘vibe shift’ as the kids say, was not an improvement.
And when used by academics in order to control and stifle discussion and debate it creates a situation where you now can’t trust their analysis because they have shown you a certain fundamental dishonesty.
Academics are in a competitive environment. They compete for attention, for grants, for book sales, for publication. They are in a sink-or-swim environment against their colleagues in their departments and in their fields. They feel these pressures. We should nevertheless expect and demand objectivity from them because of their awesome and enormous responsibilities to fairly tell the stories of the past, to control and write our collective history.
So with that backdrop, when Sally Paine was asked the way in which a reader should assess whether a book was ‘garbage history’ she cheated and I think you can see on her face the moment when she realizes she can get ahead by pretending to be objective, but in reality she’s stacking the deck in her favor.
She’s cheating. She’s dishonest. She’s protecting her elite perch by setting the rules of the debate in her favor. This is who this person is: a chronic dishonest peddler of pedantic observations.
In an interview about assessing historical works, in which she is answering the question about ‘which are good history books’ in a video labeled ‘identifying garbage history books’, she had this to say:
“The 30 second test: If the book is about another part of the world, flip to the bibliography, which you can do on Amazon, and see is there anything in the language of the country in question in the bibliography, like how much? And if there is zip, I would toss it. How many of you would be interested in reading a book that says it knows everything about the United States and there’s not a single English source cited? I think you’d regard the book as garbage. Americans do this routinely and it’s a problem with political science degrees. You need to pass a language test. And don’t try Spanish if you think you’re gonna talk about the Middle East. If it’s gonna be the Middle East it better be something like Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Hebrew, and better yet, if you’re gonna be a serious Middle Eastern expert, try all four.”
I agree with her general premise. Yes, it is of course better to have history materials that cite to sources that are native to the subject matter at hand. It is better to have authors who are fluent in the languages of the populations you are covering.
But a foreigner covering America who only reads the New York Times is not superior to the foreigner who reads truly dissident and divergent views. The point of covering any topic in history is not native fluency of the language, it’s of course the ability to understand the subject.
If you are going to read a historical work about Russia, it’s good that the author can speak Russian and is sourcing to Russian documents and works. If someone is reading about Brazil, it’s better that the author speaks Portuguese and is citing to documents that are written in Portuguese.
But is that really the litmus test of whether a work is relevant or not?
No, and it’s such a weird measure of whether a history book is garbage or not.
But of course Sally Paine says this because she has these qualifications in her background.
She says this because it sets her up as the dominant scholar in history.
Paine does this from the vantage point of her vaunted title and the fact that she studied abroad. She has a degree in Russian. That’s it.
She didn’t even study that long in these places.
Taiwan: Multiple years
Japan: Multiple years
China: One year
Russia: One year
Australia: One year
Britain: One year
Her background suggests she received a variety of awards and fellowships. These kind of programs are high status, but they place her within an academic bubble within whatever country she was placed in.
Lacking these basic status symbols and credentials, it has become very difficult to discern who is and is not a good academic.
As well, the academy’s cowardice on topics, refusal to criticize and conflict with other academics, has left professional academics as indistinct and boring establishment mouthpieces.
Paine’s bibliography of seven published full-length works: two on strategy, one on classroom management, and arguably four on historical topics, all within the basic ambit of Imperial Japan.
Is this really someone who should be opining about the width and breadth of American history?
Is this someone who is qualified to say who is writing ‘garbage history’ and who is not?
Readers of this Substack may be familiar with the name of former State Department official Alger Hiss. Hiss worked in the Department of Far East Asian Affairs at the State Department from 1936-1944. Hiss helped found the United Nations, and I would argue is the driving force behind the UN. He was at Yalta as the senior advisor to the Secretary of State.
Hiss spoke French and a little German.
Should we dismiss a work by Hiss on the history of an area that does not cite to foreign language documents? Would Hiss not be a good person to write a history of China or Japan? Or Yalta? Hiss wrote a piece about Yalta, I put it on Archive.org here. He did not cite to any originally-Russian-language works. Is his take on Yalta thusly ‘garbage’?
History doesn’t depend on fluency as much as it depends on critical thinking.
There’s also a critical distinction she’s not making between primary and secondary sources. Most works of history aren’t meant to be primary sources, they’re secondary in nature.
Can you cover a region of the world while lacking fluency in the subject area’s native tongue, using only English-language works? Of course you can.
Lacking foreign language documents in footnotes or citations does not make a work ‘garbage.’ It’s not a useful ‘30 second test’ - it’s a way to glorify Paine.
Paine is primarily talking about secondary history books. She’s not bothering to make the distinction because she’s answering the question in an entirely self-serving manner. You can see the way her eyes light up at the moment she realizes the opportunity to answer this in a self-enriching way.
What she doesn’t disclose is that she personally has had extensive language training.
This is her cheat. This is her resetting the rules so that they so grossly favor her. But I don’t even think that she would meet her own standards.
She writes about Imperial Japan, Russia, and China. Has she learned all three of those dominant languages, some of the hardest for English speakers to master? She’s just a poser.
I think this all illustrates a part of the human psyche that warrants further reflection: the tendency for authority figures to constantly redefine and ‘re-rule’ any situation in their favor.
Elites are also chronically guilty of this sin: abusing their position and status to constantly move the goalposts so as to secure their position and status.
Sophistry and language are the weapons of elites, and when one witnesses that power being abused it should be disqualifying.
If you can slightly tweak a rule, perhaps through omission or sophistry, you can usually control outcomes.
Stalin said it best: don’t fear the law, fear the judge.
People with advanced degrees, true professionals, are regularly reminded of their responsibility to be fair in dealing with others, especially those without such degrees.
That ethical responsibility is because the ability to abuse that power is so great, and the ability to abuse it without the other party even realizing it, is concurrently so great.
The political right is very rules-based. The left, knowing this, seeks to take advantage of that trait.
They seek to redefine the rules, but make them plain. In this way, they seek to reset the rules to be effectively unfair rules, but ones by which the terms of the competition can be known.
One of their critical mistakes in doing so was that they wanted to not only reset the rules, they wanted to control the results even when resetting the rules.
Even when whites, for example, are expected to compete in an unfair game of college admissions and college tuition and college scholarships, when whites still end up with better outcomes, the rules have to be perpetually reset.
The left was delegated power to set the rules, but they also wanted to cheat the results as well.
The political left has been running America’s elections for several generations. They understand the election processes a great deal more than the right, with an incredible degree of sophistication. Yet they wanted to not only same-day register voters, permit any-reason absentee voters, and allow foreign military ballots two days after polls closed, they also wanted to abuse those rules once they were found to be narrowly losing a key election.
They changed the rules in order to protect their position of power.
Our elites use this tactic repeatedly. They use it because it works. It works because our system is set up to respect hierarchies and authority, and the political right is often guilty of deferring to such structures to their own detriment.
Any elite, including any academic, that utilizes these kind of cheap tricks and cheats should be disqualified from giving further opinions and insights.
retarded