The Corsair Pirate Awards
Good riddance to 2024, as it recedes into the rear-view mirror.
Apology of the Year: Congressman Dean Phillips. It turns out it wasn’t Congressman Phillips that was delusional about the intellectual capacities of the President of the United States — no, that was actually us. Dean Phillips, who launched a quixotic campaign for President based on the premise that Joe Biden had exhausted his political fastball altogether, spent most of 2024 delegated to the political graveyard, unburied and unsung. “Phillips says he has earnestly been shocked by what he says is Biden’s ‘deluded’ threat to democracy by running at the risk of losing, how much he now believes the president is not up to campaigning and the way the Democratic establishment he was proud to be a part of is working against the people,” wrote Edward-Isaac Dovere on CNN.com last December. And, as it turns out, we really ought to have listened.
We owe a formal apology to the Congressman of Minnesota’s Third District, who warned us as early as October 2023 that Biden was not mens sana in corpore sano enough to break Trump once more. But we couldn’t bother to take him seriously. We listened to Biden’s courtiers, who knew that POTUS had “good days and bad days.”
And we learned, bitterly, far too late, that Dean called it exactly right at a time when it was politically inconvenient. And that makes him more then just right, it makes him courageous as well.
Thirstiest: NYC Mayor Eric Adams. Borborygmous is his thirst! What a difference an unsealed indictment and a Presidential election can make in the progression of a political life! How long before NYC Mayor Eric “Turkish Delight” Adams starts wearing a MAGA hat to his appearances at Gracie Mansion? And knowing Adams, who has been known in a previous life to do outfit switches at Brooklyn borough hall events, that MAGA hat will be worn with some Fosse. Adams’s about-face on Trump’s threat to democracy coincided, perfectly, with his legal liability. “‘It’s kind of embarrassing, isn’t it?’ says a member of Trump’s presidential transition team, one of three sources familiar with the situation who talked to Rolling Stone about Mar-a-Lago’s attitude towards the mayor. ‘How long until the actual begging and love letters start?’” Further — and perhaps most embarrassing — is that the word “thirsty” was employed here by people who generally do not speak in what can only be properly construed under the category of ebonics. (Averted Gaze)
Spirit of the Age: Thumotic excess. Can we focus for a bit on the sports side of Trumpian thumotic excess? TrumpWorld campaigned on the projection strength, appealing to our common reptilian brain circuitry. The sports ecosystem was a big part of that, whether football, UFC, NASCAR or even scripted “pro wrestling,” Trump cobbled together a coalition of sports-obsessives. Thumotic excess, we learned, sometimes trump’s — small t — gender and racial identification, even. When Kamala went on SNL towards the end of last season, Trump, appealing for equal time, asked not for a guest spot on the not-yet-ready-for-Prime-Time-players — he wanted to get (and got) time on NASCAR.
Harris tried; but her efforts were far too little, far too late. Perhaps no human being has come so far so fast. From running mate to Presidential candidate, raising $100 million in 48 hours. But all the money in the world — $1.5 billion, to be exact — could not push her over the finish line. Her traditional, Bob Shrum-ish campaign was disrupted by TrumpWorld’s asymmetrical athletic efforts. “Sports and culture have sort of merged together, and as sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us,” (Deputy Harris campaign manager Rob Flaherty) admitted to Semafor’s Max Tani early this month. And when you lose the athletes …
End of the Trend: Celebrity endorsements. The Kennedy family, once the monarchs of the Democrat Party, were politically irrelevant in 2024. This time, however, the endorsements of celebrities probably worked against Vice President Harris. “Vogue at one point compiled a list of 37 stars who endorsed Harris. President-Elect Donald Trump tried to counter with endorsements from the likes of Jason Aldean or Kid Rock, but he couldn’t keep pace. ‘We don’t need a star because we have policy,’ Trump said at a rally in Pittsburgh,” said Politico. The end of an era?
Loser of the Year: Iran. The death of Jimmy Carter had brought to the fore the October Surprise scandal. That scandal, now openly discussed, colored US-Iranian relations for decades.
The pendulum swings. Iran, weakened by sanctions, has been dragged into the losing end of a proxy war with Israel. And it is at least at year’s end without the strength of patrons as well as internal disruptions on its treatment of women. It should be noted that as of February 2024, less than 6% of Parliamentary seats were held by women, which is not a formula for long-term stability.
Further, the collapse of ally Assad has altered the balance of power in the region significantly, and not in the Ayatollah’s favor. “Over the past several months, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah — collectively responsible for rescuing the Assad regime from potential collapse in 2015 and bolstering the Assad regime’s survival in the intervening years — have each experienced significant hits to their power and influence in Syria,” writes Mona Yacoubian for ISIP. Season 2 of the Trump Reality Show does not augur well for the Islamic Republic.
Book of the Year: When the Clock Broke by John Ganz. As someone that came of age in the 90s, Ganz’s obsessively-researched history of the gestation of right-wing nationalist politics in America is an absolute intellectual feast. All the usual suspects — David Duke, Rudy Giuliani, Murray Rothbard — are represented here in all their smarmy vainglory. The alt-right movement they began in the 90s seeded the ground for everything that Trump stands for today, from paleo-libertarianism to cryptocurrency. To Perotism and Elon.
The blood and soil nationalism of JD Vance, as I wrote in October, evokes David Duke, who peaked in the 90s, politically. And while Trump claims to know nothing about David Duke, there is documented evidence that, in fact, he did. Even though he claimed a faulty mic led to his refusal to condemn the former kalnsman. Thirtysomething years later Trump is no longer troubled by the “anger vote” of the former Louisiana state representative. He actively courted it.
Comeback of the Year: The Cathedral of Notre Dame. The restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral is one of the great infrastructure stories of the modern age. Hundreds of construction workers and artisans were hired alongside lasers and drones to bring the historical structure back to life. In the first month of December, the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris celebrated its first Mass in five years. As Mary Harrington wrote in Unheard:
Imposing unpopular buildings takes political will, and this is largely absent in the information class, which prefers abstraction and proceduralism and lives in morbid fear of personal accountability. Branding and finance is their fluid and ambiguous happy place; but project plans with clear, irreversible material dependencies trigger vast sheaves of anxious paperwork that often comes to replace doing the actual project. Add in hostile groups weaponising the same system to obstruct the final product, and you get the morass of buck-passing, strategic ambiguity, spurious bureaucratic procrastination and other symptoms of terminal paralysis that characterises a typical Western infrastructure project.
Notre Dame escaped that trap by having the plan already in place, in the collective memory of the people of France. The brief was simple: put it back the way it was.
Defying the skeptics, Macro’s political will cannot be discounted here. But the political honeymoon appears to be already over. Because, such is human nature.
Military Technology of the Year: AI (& Drones). Last year, the Pirate went essentially to Drones, which at the time was “revolutionizing” modern warfare. But artificial intelligence even then was a close second. It was the cheapness of drones that made them so valuable to the Ukrainian war effort, but it is the decline of soldier numbers — on both sides — that is driving the rush to AI. “AI, no doubt, will be with us for the foreseeable future (ask any venture capitalist),” I wrote. “And in fact, the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative might see the roads of AI and drones converge. But drones themselves, right now, are changing the schematics of the battlefield — in Ethiopia, in the Ukraine, the Red Sea and the Middle East.”
Roughly six months later, the convergence of AI and drones is occurring in the Ukraine theater, fueled largely by the need to overcome signal-jamming by the Russians, so prevalent throughout 2024. “According to (Max Makarchuk, the AI lead for Brave1), the percentage of FPVs that hit their target is constantly falling,” wrote Max Hunder of Reuters. “Most FPV units now see a strike rate of 30-50%, while for new pilots that can be as low as 10%. He predicted that AI-operated FPV drones could post hit rates of around 80%.” If Trump doesn’t end the war in 24-hours expect the grim probability of even greater innovations in these killing technologies.
Most Underreported Story of the Year: The War in Sudan. Yes, there are bigger, horrific wars with mega-deaths going on in the world. But the Civil War in Sudan has an even greater claim to genocide that either Gaza or the Ukraine. The number of displaced Sudanese in the quixotic 20 month old civil war between the Sudan Armed Forces, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries crossed 11 million. And a new report by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine has found that in the Khartoum state, where the civil war began, deaths have been highly underreported. Al Monitor via Agence France Presse reports:
They found that in the first 14 months of the conflict, between April 2023 and June 2024, more than 61,000 people died of all causes in Khartoum State -- a 50 percent increase in the pre-war death rate.
Of those deaths, 26,000 were attributed directly to violence -- a figure significantly higher than the 20,178 intentional-injury deaths reported for the entire country by the data collection and analysis NGO Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED).
"Our findings suggest that deaths have largely gone undetected," said the LSHTM report.
And yet, still, little coverage, less reporting.
Assholes of the Year: Biden’s Courtiers. Jake Sullivan, US National Security Advisor, who delivers the PDB to Biden, had to have known that the President was not up to another campaign. And yet he — as well as his his ivy-garlanded colleagues — didn’t bother to alert the party or even the American people as to what they were dealing with every day. Were their resumes more important? It is an astonishing story, also little covered. “Blame the inner circle of overly ambitious, underly small-d democratic courtiers, who failed to advise POTUS to step down or even obliquely leak to the press,” I wrote in July. “I will try to contain my fury at these undemocratic Machiavels, who, by their silence, preserved their career prospects, no other way around it. Those who interacted on a daily basis with the President had to have some sort of a clue as to the extent of his — what does one even call it? — decline. How long did they think they could hide this, even as they were hiding the President from giving pressers and detailed interviews to journalists?” Unfortunately it looks like they will all more or less escape public scrutiny and blame.