Published on 20 May 2017
Paul von Hindenburg’s military career was already over when World War 1 broke out. He fought in legendary German battles like Königgrätz [and] Sedan and now was retired. But he returned in 1914 and became a living legend after the victory over the Russians at Tannenberg 1914. During the war he and Erich Ludendorff turned Germany in a de facto military dictatorship to steer the entire country through this total war. But Germany still lost and Hindenburg was also responsible for setting up the Dolchstoßlegende – the myth of the stab in the back of the undefeated German Army.
May 21, 2017
The Hero Of Tannenberg – Paul von Hindenburg I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
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What Fans Never Knew About Weird Al Yankovic
Published on 19 May 2017
With his seemingly endless optimism and light-hearted satire, Weird Al Yankovic has a power that goes beyond innovative lyrics and catchy tunes: he makes people happy. But Weird Al Yankovic’s path to success hasn’t always been smooth sailing. Here are the weirdest moments in Weird Al’s journey from a nerdy, accordion-playing teen to the Prince of Parody…
Dr. Demento | 0:23
Bathroom success | 1:15
Voice actor | 1:52
Band-mates forever | 2:35
The Saga Begins | 3:05
Top 10 triumph | 3:54
The UHF bomb | 4:33
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“The conceptual penis as a social construct”
Getting a paper published is one of the regular measurements of academic life — usually expressed as “publish or perish” — so getting your latest work into print is a high priority for almost all academics. Some fields have rather … lower … standards for publishing than others. Peter Boghossian, Ed.D. (aka Peter Boyle, ED.D.) and James Lindsay, Ph.D. (aka Jamie Lindsay, Ph.D.) submitted a paper written in imitation of post-structuralist discursive gender theory and got it published in a peer-reviewed journal:
The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.
That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.
This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim that there is a deep gap between what is and what ought to be, our should-never-have-been-published paper was published in the open-access (meaning that articles are freely accessible and not behind a paywall), peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences. (In case the PDF is removed, we’ve archived it.)
Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.
This already damning characterization of our hoax understates our paper’s lack of fitness for academic publication by orders of magnitude. We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.
H/T to Amy Alkon for the link.
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Tank Chats #9 Whippet – Medium A
Published on 31 Aug 2015
The ninth in a series of short films about some of the vehicles in our collection presented by The Tank Museum’s historian David Fletcher MBE.
While the heavy tanks were designed for direct attacks against enemy trenches the Tank Corps also wanted a lighter, faster tank to work with the cavalry over open country. Designed by Sir William Tritton and built by Fosters of Lincoln the Medium A, or Whippet, was the only such tank to see service with the Tank Corps, starting in 1918.
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QotD: Being a cop is dangerous … but not as dangerous as you’d think
It is less dangerous than being a cabbie, yet every time a cab driver dies in a car accident I’m not forced to listen to hour after endless hour about how that noble cabbie died so that the good people of Chicago could get from point A to point B. The on the job fatality rate for police officers is only 20 per 100,000 officers, with only 1/4th of all fatalities related to homicides. On the other hand, fishermen have a fatality rate of 127 per 100,000, meaning that if you are a fisherman, your odds of dying on the job are approximately 6 times that of a police officer. Meanwhile, the average compensation for a police officer is $57,000 compared with a salary of $26,000 for fisherman. So in addition to being six times as likely to die on the job, the average fisherman earns half as much as a cop does. So why then am I not continuously being bombarded with proclamations of the selfless brilliance of our nation’s fisherman, braving stormy, treacherous seas, contending with waves and high winds, knowing always that they might drown or be struck by lightning simply so that I might have some salmon for my evening meal?
In addition to the fact that being a cop isn’t actually dangerous, no matter what the inveterate cop-lovers might tell you, for decades American policing has been possessed of a brutality, a fearsomeness, a general degree of oppression which does not exist in any other civilized society. A distressingly large percentage of American police officers behave themselves like stormtroopers in a banana Republic.
J.R. Ireland, “Cops Deserve Rightful Criticism No Matter What Whiny, Boot Licking Conservatives Might Like to Pretend”, Locust Kings, 2015-08-20.
Note: when I originally read the linked blog post, it was available to all. At some point in the last year or so, the original author or the owner of the blog changed to a members-only model, so you are now required to log in to read it (I don’t have a Blogger account). One reader asked me whether the original post cited any sources, but more than a year later I don’t recall. My apologies for any inconvenience.
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