Published on 12 Nov 2016
It’s time for another exciting episode of Out Of The Trenches. This week we talk about the Olympic Games 1916, how the Germans reacted to the first tanks and about barbed wire.
November 13, 2016
Olympic Games 1916 – Reaction To Tanks – Barbed Wire I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
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Jane Galt’s First Law of Politics
Megan McArdle checks in from her long-awaited vacation (via Facebook):
My husband and I long ago planned a vacation for immediately after the election. We’re both exhausted; we had a zillion frequent flyer miles. So we decided to go to Asia for 12 days, and do no work.
Well, two things happened, one expected, and one not. The first was that I have horrible jet lag. My circadian rhythms make Prussian drill instructors look like devil-may care slouches; I knew from earlier experience that despite Ambien-induced attempts to reset my body clock, I would wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to get back to sleep.
The other thing I didn’t expect: Trump won the election.
I’ve been going back and forth on this all year. At times I have been convinced he couldn’t win; at other times, I’ve been shouting at smug liberals “Guys, pay attention! This could happen!” But by the time of the election, I assumed I was looking at a Clinton presidency. Journalists should know better than to “write the lede on the way to the ballpark”, but … well, yeah, okay, I shouldn’t have written the lede on the way to the ballpark.
This means that instead of taking off for vacation amidst the boring and long-awaited coronation of Clinton, I left the US with columns unwritten, columns now burning a hole in my psychological pocket. I may, from time to time, post some of those thoughts here. This isn’t work. It’s … it’s a hobby! That’s the ticket, I’m engaging in a creative craft!
So here’s my first thought, in a purely non-work, amateur capacity: Democrats are about to experience the madness that has beset the Republican Party over the last eight years.
Back when I was first blogging as Jane Galt, lo those many years ago, I coined “Jane’s First Law of Politics”: “The devotees of the Party that holds the presidency are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the Party that doesn’t hold the White House are insane.” I have never had cause to revisit this observation.
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QotD: Don’t call it software engineering
The #gotofail episode will become a text book example of not just poor attention to detail, but moreover, the importance of disciplined logic, rigor, elegance, and fundamental coding theory.
A still deeper lesson in all this is the fragility of software. Prof Arie van Deursen nicely describes the iOS7 routine as “brittle”. I want to suggest that all software is tragically fragile. It takes just one line of silly code to bring security to its knees. The sheer non-linearity of software — the ability for one line of software anywhere in a hundred million lines to have unbounded impact on the rest of the system — is what separates development from conventional engineering practice. Software doesn’t obey the laws of physics. No non-trivial software can ever be fully tested, and we have gone too far for the software we live with to be comprehensively proof read. We have yet to build the sorts of software tools and best practice and habits that would merit the title “engineering”.
I’d like to close with a philosophical musing that might have appealed to my old mentors at Telectronics. Post-modernists today can rejoice that the real world has come to pivot precariously on pure text. It is weird and wonderful that technicians are arguing about the layout of source code — as if they are poetry critics.
We have come to depend daily on great obscure texts, drafted not by people we can truthfully call “engineers” but by a largely anarchic community we would be better of calling playwrights.
Stephan Wilson, “gotofail and a defence of purists”, Lockstep, 2014-02-26.
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November 12, 2016
David Warren’s election postmortem
Unusually for David, he’s resorted to a numbered list this time:
1. How easily the college-educated go barking mad.
2. The most reliable “safe space” is a padded cell. The least reliable ought to be on campus.
3. The new administration might want to consider “transitioning” several Ivy League universities into mental homes to serve an urgent public need.
4. If you think Trump is bad, you should read some history. It wouldn’t take much. His views, in the main (as stated, not as falsely attributed), would have passed as middle-of-the-road liberal about one generation ago. On many of the issues, Trump is farther Left. By traditional standards for despots and demagogues, he strikes me as fey.
5. Which is why I despise him. I didn’t like liberal mediocrities then, and I don’t like them now.
6. On the specific question of his taste in fixtures and furnishings (including likely cabinet choices), we must be firm. On the basis of his Manhattan apartment alone, I’d be inclined to appoint a Special Prosecutor.
7. I will hope he is sufficiently Machiavellian to nominate Ted Cruz for the Scalia vacancy on the Supreme Court.
8. And then he could make a personal appearance there, shouting and waving his little hands. That could create three more vacancies.
9. Melania and Michelle should do a sitcom together. (“Transition Team.”)
10. As of three-thirty a.m. the night before last, I achieved a state of happiness I had not enjoyed for a long time. And this was with the help of only one (1) 750mL bottle of strong Belgian monastic ale. (Chimay, the red label, from the Pères Trappistes of Scourmont.) As I have indicated, I do not much care for that Donald fellow. But the defeat of Hillary was exhilarating.
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Information for would-be refugees from Trumpistan
Mark Hill does a respectable job of explaining why running away to Canada isn’t necessarily the best option for Americans disgruntled with the outcome of the 2016 election:
… for everyone else — and I really apologize for how harsh this is going to be — Canada is not your fucking safety school. If you drive across the border, there will not be a career magically waiting for you in the middle of an economic downturn. If you’re a middle-class white guy and your first instinct is to abandon your country when you experience a setback, I’m not sure how you expect to ace a job interview here. “I was sad about my country so I decided to fall back on yours” is not a good answer to “What attracted you to this position?”
I spent a lot of time on social media during election night, because it was a great excuse to not work, and two things stuck out to me. I saw lots of Americans asking themselves how they could have gotten so out of touch with the world, and then several of my American friends with a history of making exhaustingly cliched maple syrup and igloo jokes asked me how my government worked. Because up until then, they had no clue and no interest. That’s not an approach to life that helps you settle down in a new country — it’s the approach that got you into trouble in the country you’re in now.
I also saw lots of comments about how dreamy the prime minister whom I and 60.5 percent of my fellow electorate didn’t vote for is. Because clearly, if there’s one salient thing you need to know about a country’s leader, it’s whether or not they’re fuckable. A nationality is not a sports team; you can’t just buy a hat and hop on the bandwagon. Canada recently welcomed over 33,000 people fleeing a brutal civil war. If you’re not also fleeing hatred, you’re going to have to do better than “I lost a fair and democratic election, even though I Tweeted a few zingers about it, so I’m crashing at your place. You guys have a king or whatever, right? Can I have a job? Or do I have to learn the rules of hockey first, eh?”
[…]
We hated George W. Bush, and I have no doubt we’ll be making fun of Trump far more, and with all the undeserved arrogance of people whom the universe randomly placed in a different geographical location. So before that begins, let’s be clear that we still think you’re fantastic. But there’s something you need to understand.
No American I’ve ever talked to has realized just how much Canadian culture relies on the fact that we are not American. When you share the world’s longest border with the only world superpower, a country with 10 times your population, a constant reminder that “We aren’t them” is a requirement to avoid being culturally overwhelmed. Our old joke is that living next to America is like sleeping next to an elephant — even if it means you no harm, an errant twitch in the night can crush you. Hell, it’s even in our commercials. […] Those are just random trolls, but when Canada-U.S. relations are at their lowest, that’s how we think all Americans view us. Because you don’t have to care about us. And that’s fine. We’re not the superpower. It’s not like we’re experts on Italy or Mongolia or any other country that’s as irrelevant to us as we are to you. But we’re experts on you because it’s impossible not to be. And when you struggle, our arrogant side can’t help but laugh and think that maybe you should have paid a little more attention to us after all. We don’t want to be like you right now. But you can’t keep an elephant from rolling over onto you.
QotD: Trumphausen by Proxy
So a new entry in the lexicon of mental illness?
Trumphausen by Proxy – when parents instill in their children irrational fears to garner sympathy and attention for themselves.
Comment by “Anna Puma” on “Leftists Ruin Everything, Including Childhood [Warden]”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2016-11-10.
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November 11, 2016
Mark Knopfler – “Remembrance Day”
A Remembrance Day slideshow using Mark Knopfler’s wonderful “Remembrance Day” song from the album Get Lucky (2009). The early part of the song conveys many British images, but I have added some very Canadian images also which fit with many of the lyrics. The theme and message is universal… ‘we will remember them’.
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Charming The Poles – The Central Powers Look For New Allies I THE GREAT WAR Week 120
Published on 10 Nov 2016
The year of battles is coming to a close as winter approaches. The Central Powers realise that they need new troops and new war material if they actually want to win the war and not just continue it. Erich Ludendorff dreams of a Polish Army under German command and to charm the Poles in the German Empire and the occupied territories, the Kingdom of Poland is established.
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In memoriam
A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:
The Great War
Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
(Elizabeth’s great uncle)- Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
(Elizabeth’s great grandfather) - Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
(my great uncle) - Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
(Elizabeth’s great uncle)
The Second World War
- Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
(my great uncle) - Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the Defensively Equipped Merchant fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
(Elizabeth’s father) - Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
(Elizabeth’s uncle) - Elizabeth Buller, “Lumberjill” in the Women’s Land Army in Scotland through the war.
(Elizabeth’s mother) - Trooper Leslie Taplan Russon, 3rd Royal Tank Regiment, died at Tobruk, 19 December, 1942 (aged 23).
A recently discovered relative. Leslie was my father’s first cousin, once removed (and therefore my first cousin, twice removed).
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD Canadian Army Medical Corps (1872-1918)
QotD: The amazing long-term success of Soviet subversion in the West
The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals; summary by Koch here) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.
Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.
Koch shows us that the worst-case scenario was, as it turns out now, the correct one; these ideas, like the “race bomb” rumor, really were instruments deliberately designed to destroy the American way of life. Another index of their success is that most members of the bicoastal elite can no longer speak of “the American way of life” without deprecation, irony, or an automatic and half-conscious genuflection towards the altar of political correctness. In this and other ways, the corrosive effects of Stalin’s meme war have come to utterly pervade our culture.
The most paranoid and xenophobic conservatives of the Cold War were, painful though this is to admit, the closest to the truth in estimating the magnitude and subtlety of Soviet subversion. Liberal anticommunists (like myself in the 1970s) thought we were being judicious and fair-minded when we dismissed half of the Right’s complaint as crude blather. We were wrong; the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss really were guilty, the Hollywood Ten really were Stalinist tools, and all of Joseph McCarthy’s rants about “Communists in the State Department” were essentially true. The Venona transcripts and other new material leave no room for reasonable doubt on this score.
While the espionage apparatus of the Soviet Union didn’t outlast it, their memetic weapons did. These memes are now coming near to crippling our culture’s response to Islamic terrorism.
Eric S. Raymond, “Gramscian damage”, Armed and Dangerous, 2006-02-11.
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November 10, 2016
In other lines of work, they’d call it professional malpractice
Jay Currie linked to this explanation from Michael Wolff of how the mainstream media lost touch with reality in this election campaign:
Not only did the media get almost everything about this presidential election wrong, but it became the central issue, or the stand-in for all those issues, that the great new American Trump Party voted against.
The transmutation of political identities has arguably devolved into two parties: the Trump one, the angry retro people, and the Media Party, representing the smug modern people, each anathema to and uncomprehending of the other. Certainly, there was no moment in the campaign where the Media Party did not see itself as a virtuous and, most often, determinative factor in the race. Given this, the chants of “CNN sucks” at Trump rallies should not have been entirely surprising.
But they were. The media took this as a comment about press freedom rather than its own failure to read the zeitgeist. In fact, it largely failed to tell any story other than its own.
[…]
It was a failure to understand the power of the currents running for Trump — a failure of intelligence, experience and objectivity, on particularly excruciating display last night in Buzzfeed’s live video feed with its cast of moronic, what-me-worry millennials having their first go at election night and now eager to take over the media.
And it was a failure of modern journalistic technique too. It was the day the data died. All of the money poured by a financially challenged media industry into polls and polling analysis was for naught. It profoundly misinformed. It created a compelling and powerful narrative that was the opposite of what was actually happening. There may be few instances, except perhaps under authoritarian regimes, where the media has so successfully propounded a view of events not only of its own making but at such odds with reality. Trump is a simple proof: forget polls — they say what you want them to say.
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Tracking the rise of Il Donalduce
I was curious enough to go back to when I created a “DonaldTrump” tag for posts here on the blog and see how much has changed since he entered the race:
- The tag was created on June 18 of last year when I posted a link to P.J. O’Rourke’s notion that Trump was the perfectly “representative” candidate.
- In August (two months with no Trump sightings? Those were the days…), I linked to Walter Russell Mead taking a swing at defining what it is that Trump offered to the disaffected plurality (majority?) of would-be Republican voters. A few days later, Megan McArdle found herself coming back to the phrase “bag o’ crazy” when she tried to make sense of Donald Trump’s immigration proposals.
- In September, I linked to Grant McCracken’s explanation for why revelations of faults and gaffes didn’t cost Trump much of his support, while Ace speculated that the Trump kryptonite might be “middle class respectability”.
- In December, Megan McArdle wrote a piece that an unkind soul might call to her attention now, including the immortal line “I rank the odds of a Trump presidency somewhere below the odds of my winning the lottery”. We also looked at the impact of “The Donald” on “The Overton Window”, and Megan McArdle got uncharacteristically conspiracy theoristic.
- In January, Scott Adams began earning more attention (and much more vilification) for his “master persuader” posts on the Trump insurgency, and Tucker Carlson explained why the conservative establishment so badly misjudged the folks who vociferously supported The Donald. Colby Cosh also gave props to Adams and discussed the odd state of the state of Iowa in US presidential elections.
- In March, economist Don Boudreaux speculated on the possible good outcome of a Trump electoral victory, and Colby Cosh wrote “Dear America: We need to talk about Donald“. Scott Adams speculated about Trump’s possible rhetorical tactics against Hillary Clinton in the general election. I also finally settled on the appropriate nickname to use for Il Donalduce, having briefly tried “Mussotrumpi” and “The Donald”.
- In April, Scott Adams wrote on some of Il Donalduce’s recent political mistakes.
- In May, Adams discussed Clinton’s use of the literal “Woman Card”, and Megan McArdle bewailed the pointlessness of trying to analyze any given Trump policy. Warren Meyer pointed out that Clinton and Trump are equally bad in terms of crony capitalism. Jim Geraghty imagined that Trump was probably thinking “how hard can it be?” to run a government. Tim Worstall pointed out that, despite incoherency on other policies, Trump was correct on solving California’s water crisis.
- In June, Megan McArdle refuted the “Trump is a scary autocrat” scenario, Camille Paglia compared and contrasted the Clinton and Trump campaigns, and Scott Adams decides to endorse Clinton for his personal safety. Simon Penner explains why President Trump could not do all the things his hysterical opponents claim he would.
- In July, Shikha Dalmia criticized the “return to mercantilism” aspects of Trump’s trade policies and Scott Adams considered the possibility of Obama declaring martial law to prevent President-elect Trump from taking office. Jonathan Freedland looked at the alienated GOP establishment and the #NeverTrump-ers.
- At what appeared to be a low point in Trump’s fortunes in August, David Zincavage wondered what Trump would be doing differently if he was actually aiming to lose. After what many pundits considered a potentially geopolitical destabilizing statement on NATO, Tom Kratman concludes that Trump wouldn’t actually abandon the alliance. Regardless of the election’s outcome, Scott Adams thought he’d identified a silver lining to the 2016 presidential race.
- In September, Jay Currie suggested a three-part plan to bring about a Trump victory, and Tamara Keel outlined the impossible choice facing American voters in November.
- October saw Megan McArdle addressing the social media outrage at revelations from Il Donalduce‘s partial tax returns leaked to the media. Also in October, an unusually fair article appeared in the Guardian on who Trump’s supporters really were, and Jay Currie looked at the state of US election polling (which we now know from the differences between predictions and actual results is dire).
- In early November, Ken Stern peered into the murky depths of the right-wing media bubble (and the matching one on the left), then the totally unexpected landslide occurred, and I blamed it on the media (usually a safe accusation to make).
QotD: Science’s Biggest Fail
What is science’s biggest fail of all time?
I nominate everything about diet and fitness.
Maybe science has the diet and fitness stuff mostly right by now. I hope so. But I thought the same thing twenty years ago and I was wrong.
I used to think fatty food made you fat. Now it seems the opposite is true. Eating lots of peanuts, avocados, and cheese, for example, probably decreases your appetite and keeps you thin.
I used to think vitamins had been thoroughly studied for their health trade-offs. They haven’t. The reason you take one multivitamin pill a day is marketing, not science.
I used to think the U.S. food pyramid was good science. In the past it was not, and I assume it is not now.
I used to think drinking one glass of alcohol a day is good for health, but now I think that idea is probably just a correlation found in studies.
I used to think I needed to drink a crazy-large amount of water each day, because smart people said so, but that wasn’t science either.
I could go on for an hour.
You might be tempted to say my real issue is with a lack of science, not with science. In some of the cases I mentioned there was a general belief that science had studied stuff when in fact it had not. So one could argue that the media and the government (schools in particular) are to blame for allowing so much non-science to taint the field of real science. And we all agree that science is not intended to be foolproof. Science is about crawling toward the truth over time.
Perhaps my expectations were too high. I expected science to tell me the best ways to eat and to exercise. Science did the opposite, sometimes because of misleading studies and sometimes by being silent when bad science morphed into popular misconceptions. And science was pretty damned cocky about being right during this period in which it was so wrong.
So you have the direct problem of science collectively steering my entire generation toward obesity, diabetes, and coronary problems. But the indirect problem might be worse: It is hard to trust science.
Scott Adams, “Science’s Biggest Fail”, Scott Adams Blog, 2015-02-02.
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November 9, 2016
The 2016 election result was really the work of the media
It’s not the first time the mass media as a whole has favoured one candidate over another, but it was the first time that the majority of the TV and newspaper coverage was actively partisan rather than just overtly favouring one party or candidate. Remember that Il Donalduce got almost literally non-stop media attention during the Republican primaries, as he was seen as the one most likely to flame out in the general election. Yes, his candidacy was “news”, but it became almost impossible for any of the other candidates to get any more coverage than a redshirted Star Trek extra — you get a couple of hackneyed, predictable lines, then you get your tragic death scene. Do you even remember who else ran for the nomination? How about good old Ted Rubio or Marco Cruz or Scott Fiorina or Carly Walker or John Carson or Ben Kasich? How about Chris Bush or Jeb Christie? Rand Perry or Rick Paul? Redshirts, every one, thanks to the glaring unending focus on Il Donalduce, the star of the biggest reality TV show in history.
In the Guardian, Thomas Frank explains why Hillary Clinton was the wrong candidate for the Democrats, even against the weakest G.O.P. candidate in living memory:
He has run one of the lousiest presidential campaigns ever. In saying so I am not referring to his much-criticized business practices or his vulgar remarks about women. I mean this in a purely technical sense: this man fractured his own party. His convention was a fiasco. He had no ground game to speak of. The list of celebrities and pundits and surrogates taking his side on the campaign trail was extremely short. He needlessly offended countless groups of people: women, Hispanics, Muslims, disabled people, mothers of crying babies, the Bush family, and George Will-style conservatives, among others. He even lost Glenn Beck, for pete’s sake.
And now he is going to be president of the United States. The woman we were constantly assured was the best-qualified candidate of all time has lost to the least qualified candidate of all time. Everyone who was anyone rallied around her, and it didn’t make any difference. The man too incompetent to insult is now going to sit in the Oval Office, whence he will hand down his beauty-contest verdicts on the grandees and sages of the old order.
[…]
To try to put over such a nominee while screaming that the Republican is a rightwing monster is to court disbelief. If Trump is a fascist, as liberals often said, Democrats should have put in their strongest player to stop him, not a party hack they’d chosen because it was her turn. Choosing her indicated either that Democrats didn’t mean what they said about Trump’s riskiness, that their opportunism took precedence over the country’s well-being, or maybe both.
Clinton’s supporters among the media didn’t help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation’s papers, but it was the quality of the media’s enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here’s what it consisted of:
- Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
- Her scandals weren’t real.
- The economy was doing well / America was already great.
- Working-class people weren’t supporting Trump.
- And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.
How did the journalists’ crusade fail? The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach?
Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.
Italian Rifles of World War 1 featuring Othais from C&RSENAL I THE GREAT WAR – Special
Published on 8 Nov 2016
All about the Carcano Carbine on C&Rsenal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG3-i…
In our last live stream with Othais we talked about the Italian rifles and pistols of WW1. This is the slightly edited version in which we focus on the rifles. Check out Othais’ channel for more details.
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