The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West’s will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.
But al-Qaeda didn’t create the ugly streak of nihilism and self-loathing that afflicts too many Western intellectuals. Nor, I believe, is it a natural development. It was brought to us by Department V of the KGB, which was charged during the Cold War with conducting memetic warfare that would destroy the will of the West’s intelligentsia to resist a Communist takeover. This they did with such magnificent effect that the infection outlasted the Soviet Union itself and remains a pervasive disease of contemporary Western intellectual life.
Consider the following propositions:
- There is no truth, only competing agendas.
- All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
- There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
- The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
- Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.
- Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
- The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
- For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself.
- But “oppressed” people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
- When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.
These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism, multiculturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, “political correctness” to name just a few. It is time to recognize them for what they are, and call them by their right name: suicidalism.
Eric S. Raymond, “Suicidalism”, Armed and Dangerous, 2005-09-13.
September 6, 2017
QotD: Suicidalism
September 5, 2017
The 100 Year Flood Is Not What You Think It Is (Maybe)
Published on 6 Mar 2016
Today on Practical Engineering we’re talking about hydrology, and I took a little walk through my neighborhood to show you some infrastructure you may have never noticed before.
Almost everyone agrees that flooding is bad. Most years it’s the number one natural disaster in the US by dollars of damage. So being able to characterize flood risks is a crucial job of civil engineers. Engineering hydrology has equal parts statistics and understanding how society treats risks. Water is incredibly important to us, and it shapes almost every facet of our lives, but it’s almost never in the right place at the right time. Sometimes there’s not enough, like in a drought or just an arid region, but we also need to be prepared for the times when there’s too much water, a flood. Rainfall and streamflow have tremendous variability and it’s the engineer’s job to characterize that so that we can make rational and intelligent decisions about how we develop the world around us. Thanks for watching!
FEMA Floodplain Maps: https://msc.fema.gov/portal
USGS Stream Gages: http://maps.waterdata.usgs.gov/mapper
Georges Guynemer – The Flying Icon of France I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
Published on 4 Sep 2017
George Guynemer was one of the top scoring flying aces of the entire First World War with 54 aerial victories. In his lifetime, he was celebrated as a hero, an icon and an inspiration in France. When he went missing 100 years ago, in September 1917, it was a great shock to the nation and to this day his death is not fully understood.
“So, let’s consider the concept of a ‘500-year flood'”
Charlie Martin explains how it’s possible to have two “500-year floods” in less than 500 years:
There have been a lot of people suggesting that Harvey the Hurricane shows that “really and truly climate change is happening, see, in-your-face deniers!”
Of course, it’s possible, even though the actual evidence — including the 12-year drought in major hurricanes — is against it. But hurricanes are a perfect opportunity for stupid math tricks. Hurricanes also provide great opportunities to explain concepts that are unclear to people. So, let’s consider the concept of a “500-year flood.”
Most people hear this and think it means “one flood this size in 500 years.” The real definition is subtly different: saying “a 500-year flood” actually means “there is one chance in 500 of a flood this size happening in any year.”
It’s called a “500-year flood” because statistically, over a long enough time, we would expect to have roughly one such flood on average every 500 years. So, if we had 100,000 years of weather data (and things stayed the same otherwise, which is an unrealistic assumption) then we’d expect to have seen 100,000/500- or 200 500-year floods [Ed. typo fixed] at that level.
The trouble is, we’ve only got about 100 years of good weather data for the Houston area.
Tank Chats #18 Mark I
Published on 15 Apr 2016
David Fletcher has returned to host the latest Tank Chat, on the Mark I tank.
The Museum’s Mark I is the only surviving example of this, the first tank produced to go into battle.
Find out more about the First World War on the Tank Museum’s Centenary blog, Tank 100 http://www.tank100.com
QotD: Microaggressions
Whenever I first heard the word “microaggression,” sometime in the last five years, I’m sure I was unaware how big “micro” could get. The accusation of a microaggression was about to become a pervasive feature of the Internet, and particularly social media. An offense most of us didn’t even know existed, suddenly we were all afraid of being accused of.
We used to call this “rudeness,” “slights” or “ignorant remarks.” Mostly, people ignored them. The elevation of microaggressions into a social phenomenon with a specific name and increasingly public redress marks a dramatic social change, and two sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, have a fascinating paper exploring what this shift looks like, and what it means. (Jonathan Haidt has provided a very useful CliffsNotes version.)
Western society, they argue, has shifted from an honor culture — in which slights are taken very seriously, and avenged by the one slighted — to a dignity culture, in which personal revenge is discouraged, and justice is outsourced to third parties, primarily the law. The law being a cumbersome beast, people in dignity cultures are encouraged to ignore slights, or negotiate them privately by talking with the offender, rather than seeking some more punitive sanction.
Microagressions mark a transition to a third sort of culture: a victim culture, in which people are once again encouraged to take notice of slights. This sounds a lot like honor culture, doesn’t it? Yes, with two important differences. The first is that while victimhood is shameful in an honor culture — and indeed, the purpose of taking vengeance is frequently to avoid this shame — victim status is actively sought in the new culture, because victimhood is a prerequisite for getting redress. The second is that victim culture encourages people to seek help from third parties, either authorities or the public, rather than seeking satisfaction themselves.
Megan McArdle, “How Grown-Ups Deal With ‘Microaggressions'”, Bloomberg View, 2015-09-11.
September 4, 2017
After the waiver period, the Vikings sign players to their 10-man practice squad
The Vikings only received one player off the waiver wire, former San Francisco tight end Blake Bell. Bell was coached by current Vikings OL coach Tony Sparano during his rookie year. The team freed up a roster spot for him by waiving/injured tight end Bucky Hodges.
Among the Vikings’ waivered players, offensive lineman Zac Kerin was claimed by the Detroit Lions, linebacker Edmond Robinson was claimed by the New York Jets, and (showing just how desperate teams are for offensive linemen) former starting tackle T.J. Clemmings was picked up by the Washington Redskins. Both Kerin and Robinson had standing invitations to the Vikings’ practice squad if they cleared waivers (Clemmings almost certainly did not).
The following players have been added to the practice squad:
- LB Elijah Lee (drafted by the Vikings in the seventh round, initially claimed he didn’t want to join Minnesota’s PS and hoped to be picked up by another team instead)
- QB Kyle Sloter (Played the preseason in Denver, going 31 of 43 for 413 yards with 3 TDs and 0 INTs … with Taylor Heinicke going to IR, the team definitely needed another quarterback for the scout team. The Vikings are paying him serious money for a PS player: $340,000 … NFL minimum for a rookie on the 53-man roster is $465,000.)
- RB Bronson Hill (free agent who spent time with the Bengals and Jaguars in 2016)
- DT Ifeadi Odenigbo (drafted by the Vikings in the seventh round of the 2017 draft)
- CB Horace Richardson (undrafted free agent, spent the preseason with the Vikings)
- DT Dylan Bradley (undrafted free agent, spent the preseason with the Vikings)
- TE Kyle Carter (spent time on the Vikings PS in 2016, undrafted in 2016)
- WR Cayleb Jones (free agent who was on the Eagles PS in 2016, then signed to the Vikings PS in December)
Two spots on the practice squad remained open, as of Sunday night.
Update: The Vikings signed two players to fill the remaining spots on the practice squad on Monday:
- C Cornelius Edison (was on Chicago’s roster and appeared in six games and spent the preseason with Atlanta)
- OT Cedrick Lang (spent the preseason with Denver)
The mental health crisis on campus
In Spiked, Naomi Firsht shares the concerns of Jonathan Haidt about the rise of mental health issues at US universities:
The heightened vulnerability of college students has had a chilling effect on discussion in the academic world, and Haidt sees this in his day-to-day experience on campus. “There is a rapidly spreading feeling that we are all walking on eggshells, both students and faculty. That we are now accountable, not for what we say, but for how anyone who hears it might take it. And if you have to speak, thinking about the worst reading that anyone could put on your words, that means you cannot be provocative, you cannot take risks, that means you will play it safe when you speak… This is what I’m seeing in my classes when topics related to race or gender come up – which we used to be able to talk about 10 years ago, but now it’s painful and there’s a lot of silence.”
This is disastrous for academic life, as Haidt points out: “A university cannot function if people will not put their ideas forth, will not contest ideas that they think are wrong, will not stand up for ideas that they think are right.”
He is keen to emphasise that this is not a right-left issue. “Several people on the left are noticing that college students are less effective politically as activists, as progressives, when they have this morality and this ethos with such heavy concept creep.”Haidt believes there is a mental-health crisis on campus: “I have never seen such rapid increase in indicators of anxiety and depression as we have seen in the past few years”, he says. But his suggested approach is unlikely to find favour with student communities fond of Safe Spaces and therapeutic puppy-petting. “If you think about it as a mental-health crisis”, he explains, “then you might be tempted to say: we need more help, more counselling, more protection for those who are suffering from mental illness. But if you look at it that way you will miss the broader pattern, which is that for 20 to 30 years now, Americans have been systematically undermining the development of resilience or toughness of their children.” Referencing the work of Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-range Kids, he concludes: “We have made our children too safe to succeed.”
In his forthcoming book Misguided Minds: How Three Bad Ideas Are Leading Young People, Universities, and Democracies Toward Failure, Haidt claims that certain ideas are impairing students’ chances of success. Those ideas being: your feelings are always right; what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; and the world is divided into good people and bad people. “If we can teach those three ideas to college students”, he says, “we cannot guarantee they will fail, but we will minimise their odds at success”.
So how can we resolve the problem of vulnerability among young Americans? Haidt says part of the solution must begin in childhood and will require parents to give their children daily periods of “unsupervised time”. “We have to accept the fact that in that unsupervised time there will be name-calling, conflict and exclusion. And while it’s painful for parents to accept this, in the long-run it will give them children that are not suffering from such high rates of anxiety and depression.”
Hollywood facing the worst box office returns in years
Ryan Faughnder reports on the bad summer movies season:
As Hollywood wraps up the all-important summer box-office season this Labor Day weekend, a sobering reality has gripped the industry.
The number of tickets sold in the United States and Canada this summer is projected to fall to the lowest level in a quarter-century.
The results have put the squeeze on the nation’s top theater chains, whose stocks have taken a drubbing. AMC Theatres Chief Executive Adam Aron this month called his company’s most recent quarter “simply a bust.”
Such blunt language reflects some worrisome trends. Domestic box-office revenue is expected to total $3.78 billion for the first weekend of May through Labor Day — a key period that generates about 40% of domestic ticket sales — down nearly 16% from the same period last year, according to comScore. That’s an even worse decline than the 10% drop some studio executives predicted before the summer began.
The usual suspects are being blamed: unlike previous years, moviegoers have other calls on their entertainment time and dollars, including the rise of gaming platforms, streaming sites like Netflix, and the attraction of watching freshly painted surfaces dry. The online critics at Rotten Tomatoes also come in for their fair shame of blame for Hollywood’s plight.
Update: Fixed broken link. Sorry for any inconvenience.
How to Pronounce UK Place Names – Anglophenia Ep 23
Published on 21 Jan 2015
Anglophenia’s Siobhan Thompson teaches Science Friction’s Rusty Ward — and the rest of America — how to pronounce difficult British place names.
Learn how to pronounce even more British place names here: http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2014/01/pronounce-deliberately-offputting-british-place-names/
Visit the Anglophenia blog: http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia
QotD: Even a world of perfect abundance would not be a crime-free world
So, when I woke up this morning I woke up thinking of how time is different in different parts of the world, which is what the people (Heinlein and Simak included) who pushed for the UN and thought it was the way of the future didn’t seem to get (to be fair, in Tramp Royale it becomes obvious Heinlein got it when he traveled there, and realized it was impossible to bring such a disparate world under one government.)
A minor side note, while listening to City, there is a point at which Simak describes what he might or might not have realized was Marx’s concept of “perfect communism” where the state withers away because there’s no need for it.
Simak thought this would be brought about by perfect abundance. There are no crimes of property when everyone has too much. There are no crimes of violence either, because he seems to think those come from property. (Hits head gently on desk.)
This must have seemed profound to me when I first read the book at 12, but right now I just stared at the mp3 player thinking “what about people who capture other people as sex slaves?” “What about people who covet something someone else made, including the life someone made for themselves? Just because everyone has too much, it doesn’t mean that they don’t covet what someone else made of their too much.”
Which is why I’m not a believer in either Communism or for that matter big L Libertarianism. I don’t believe that humans are only a sum of their material needs and crime the result of the unequal distribution of property. (There is also the unequal distribution of talent, or simply the unequal distribution of happiness, all of which can lead to crime — after all Cain didn’t off Abel because he was starving.) And I don’t believe humans are ever going to become so perfect we can get away with no government, because humans will always (being at heart social apes) lust for power, recognition and heck simply control over others (which is subtly different from power.) So we’re stuck with our good servant but bad master.
Sarah A. Hoyt, “Time Zones”, According to Hoyt, 2015-06-23.
September 3, 2017
Battlefield 1 Historical Analysis – In The Name Of The Tsar – They Shall Not Pass I THE GREAT WAR
Published on 2 Sep 2017
WW1 Armoured Trains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5Jl5KdG-Tc
WW1 China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TofCRaOBWZ0
Women’s Battalion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cndgoEd3fkkTwo new expansions for Battlefield 1 dropped in the past few months and they introduced two of the most important factions of World War 1: France and Russia. And since you guys liked our other trailer analysis videos, we decided to review the existing trailer footage and give you some background.
Please send your comments about the mistaken General Liu rifle to: allww1erarifleslookthesametous@thegreatwar.tv
Medieval Castles – Elements of Fortifications
Published on 17 Jan 2017
This episode covers the various elements of castle fortification elements like towers, walls, moats, loopholes, gates, gatehouses, portcullises, battlements, hoardings, draw bridges, etc.
Military History Visualized provides a series of short narrative and visual presentations like documentaries based on academic literature or sometimes primary sources. Videos are intended as introduction to military history, but also contain a lot of details for history buffs. Since the aim is to keep the episodes short and comprehensive some details are often cut.
» SOURCES & LINKS «
Kaufmann, J.E; Kaufmann, H.W.: The Medieval Fortress – Castles, Forts, and Walled Cities of the Middle Ages.
Piper, Otto: Burgenkunde. Bauwesen und Geschichte der Burgen.
Toy, Sidney: Castles – Their Construction and History
Vikings cut down to “final” 53 players for 2017
I put the quotes around the word “final” in the headline because every team in the league will be sifting through the nearly 2,000 players who were waived in the last 48 hours and a few may end up bumping someone off the roster as a result. Those veteran players who were released are eligible to sign with any team, but players with less than four years of NFL experience are subject to waiver claims, which are allocated based on the previous season’s finishing order. The team with the worst 2016 record has top priority for waiver claims and the current Super Bowl champs have lowest priority. So, for example, Cleveland could claim up to 53 players off the waiver wire, and would be awarded with every one of them. The Vikings are near the middle of the pack for waiver priority. At noon Eastern time on Sunday, teams are informed if their waiver claims have been granted and after 1:00pm, all teams can begin signing eligible players to their 10-man practice squads.
Most of the players who didn’t make the 53-man roster were not expected to, but one player not only was expected to, he was a starter: offensive guard Alex Boone was released only one year into his four-year contract. Boone had not been playing as well as hoped, but few people expected him to be cut. His release means the team takes a $3.4 million hit (the guaranteed portion of his salary), but also frees up another $3.3 million under the salary cap. Arif Hasan found the cut “baffling“.
Until the waiver wire results are announced, here is the Vikings roster for 2017:
The Bronze Age Collapse Explained
Published on 11 Jun 2016
If you are like many people these days, you fawn over the latest episode of The Walking Dead, enjoy movies like the Hunger Games, or lost your mind during Mad Max Fury Road. We seem to think a lot about what the apocalypse for our society might be like. Well, what if the apocalypse already happened… say 3,200 years ago.
Read More:
Dickinson, Oliver (2007). The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age: Continuity and Change Between the Twelfth and Eighth Centuries BC
Cline, Eric H. (2014). 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization CollapsedStep Back is a history channel releasing videos biweekly that endeavors to go past the names, dates, and battles you might find elsewhere. It invites you to take a step back, consider the past and how it connects to today. We search for the quirky, unconventional, and just plain weird parts of our collective story.
