Quotulatiousness

October 4, 2017

Initial finding of gender-integrated infantry unit study

Filed under: Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Duffelblog is your source for what’s going on in the US military:

A recent Department of Defense study on infantry units revealed that gender-integrated units smelled 237% better than non-integrated units.

“We set out to measure combat effectiveness of course, but the smell issue quickly took precedence as our female survey administrators noticed how much better it smelled in the integrated unit workspaces,” said Dr. Anthony Jenkins, study coordinator.

“The non-integrated units smelled like ass, BO, feet and beer,” said researcher Sienna Smith. “At the integrated sites, however, it smelled like a combination of Old Spice, Axe and wintergreen mouthwash, with a curious hint of Twilight Woods and Japanese Cherry Blossom body wash.”

Male unit members denied any changes in habits that could have led to the differences, though one was seen kicking a bottle of body spray under his rack as the research team inspected living spaces.

“Nah man, I mean Ma’am, I ain’t changin’ my style just cause we got girls around now. It’s probably all their scented lotions and soap and junk that you smell,” said Cpl. Juan Suarez.

TANKFEST 2017 – Behind the Scenes with The Mighty Jingles

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tank Museum
Published on 3 Oct 2017

See the best display of historic moving armour in the world, 29 June – 1 July, at The Tank Museum, Bovington. Tickets for TANKFEST 2018 are now on sale. www.tankfest.com

Youtuber The Mighty Jingles went behind the scenes at TANKFEST 2017 to meet the people who make TANKFEST work.

Camille Paglia on the cultural influence of Hugh Hefner and Playboy

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Hollywood Reporter, Jeanie Pyun talks to Camille Paglia about the late Hugh Hefner and his once-mighty Playboy empire:

Have you ever been to a party at the Playboy Mansion?

No, I’m not a partygoer! (Laughs.)

So let me just ask: Was Hugh Hefner a misogynist?

Absolutely not! The central theme of my wing of pro-sex feminism is that all celebrations of the sexual human body are positive. Second-wave feminism went off the rails when it was totally unable to deal with erotic imagery, which has been a central feature of the entire history of Western art ever since Greek nudes.

So let’s dig in a little — what would you say was Playboy‘s cultural impact?

Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post-World War II era, men’s magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair.

Hefner reimagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex. Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation — in which American men have never distinguished themselves — and the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French.

Hefner’s new vision of American masculinity was part of his desperate revision of his own Puritan heritage. On his father’s side, he descended directly from William Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower and was governor of Plymouth Colony, the major settlement of New England Puritans.

But Hefner’s worldview was already dated by the explosion of the psychedelic 1960s. The anything-goes, free-love atmosphere — illustrated by all that hedonistic rolling around in the mud at Woodstock in 1969 — made the suave Hefner style seem old-fashioned and buttoned up. Nevertheless, I have always taken the position that the men’s magazines — from the glossiest and most sophisticated to the rawest and raunchiest — represent the brute reality of sexuality. Pornography is not a distortion. It is not a sexist twisting of the facts of life but a kind of peephole into the roiling, primitive animal energies that are at the heart of sexual attraction and desire.

What could today’s media learn from what Hef did at Playboy?

It must be remembered that Hefner was a gifted editor who knew how to produce a magazine that had great visual style and that was a riveting combination of pictorial with print design. Everything about Playboy as a visual object, whether you liked the magazine or not, was lively and often ravishing.

H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.

British Boys Anti-Tank Rifle

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 24 Aug 2015

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

Hammer Price: $3,750

Pretty much every major military had an antitank rifle in service when WW2 kicked off, and the British example was the Boys rifle, named after the Captain Boys who designed it. It was a bolt action .55 caliber rifle with 5-round detachable magazines. If was obsolete by 1943 and replaced by the more effective but equally unpleasant PIAT.

QotD: Transnational progressivism

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Soviets didn’t invent [transnational progressivism], but they promoted it heavily in a deliberate — and appallingly successful — attempt to weaken the Lockean, individualist tradition that underlies classical liberalism and the U.S. Constitution. The reduction of Western politics to a bitter war for government favor between ascriptive identity groups is exactly the outcome the Soviets wanted and worked hard to arrange.

Call it what you will — various other commentators have favored ‘volk-Marxism’ or ‘postmodern leftism’. I’ve called it suicidalism. It was designed to paralyze the West against one enemy, but it’s now being used against us by another. It is no accident that Osama bin Laden so often sounds like he’s reading from back issues of Z magazine, and no accident that both constantly echo the hoariest old cliches of Soviet propaganda in the 1930s and ’40s.

Another consequence of Stalin’s meme war is that today’s left-wing antiwar demonstrators wear kaffiyehs without any sense of how grotesque it is for ostensible Marxists to cuddle up to religious absolutists who want to restore the power relations of the 7th century CE. In Stalin’s hands, even Marxism itself was hollowed out to serve as a memetic weapon — it became increasingly nihilist, hatred-focused and destructive. The postmodern left is now defined not by what it’s for but by what it’s against: classical-liberal individualism, free markets, dead white males, America, and the idea of objective reality itself.

The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating. Liberating, too, it is to realize that the Noam Chomskys and Michael Moores and Robert Fisks of the world (and their thousands of lesser imitators in faculty lounges everywhere) are not brave transgressive forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant.

Brittingham and other have worried that postmodern leftism may yet win. If so, the victory would be short-lived. One of the clearest lessons of recent times (exemplified not just by kaffiyeh-wearing western leftists but by Hamas’s recent clobbering of al-Fatah in the first Palestinian elections) is that po-mo leftism is weaker than liberal individualism in one important respect; it has only the weakest defenses against absolutist fervor. Brittingham tellingly notes po-mo philosopher Richard Rorty’s realization that when the babble of conflicting tribal narratives collapses in exhaustion, the only thing left is the will to power.

Again, this is by design. Lenin and Stalin wanted classical-liberal individualism replaced with something less able to resist totalitarianism, not more. Volk-Marxist fantasy and postmodern nihilism served their purposes; the emergence of an adhesive counter-ideology would not have. Thus, the Chomskys and Moores and Fisks are running a program carefully designed to dead-end at nothing.

Eric S. Raymond, “Gramscian damage”, Armed and Dangerous, 2006-02-11.

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