Quotulatiousness

September 25, 2018

Is the UK military situation really as dire as this new book portrays?

Filed under: Britain, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Daily Mail, there’s an excerpt from a new book on the British military by Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott, White Flag? An Examination Of The UK’s Defence Capability:

HMS Astute (S119), lead ship of her class, sails up the Clyde estuary into her home port of Faslane, Scotland.
MOD photo, via Wikimedia Commons.

Bluntly, at a time of international crisis, when the prime minister wanted to take a stand against the illegal use of chemical weapons, our Armed Forces did not have what was needed for a full-throttle response.

Naturally, ministers preferred voters to imagine that submarines were on their way to the action. The truth about our limited capability might have fuelled creeping fears that the UK has run up the white flag.

This was one of the many shocks we had during our wide-ranging investigation into the state of this country’s defence capabilities. Thanks to remorseless cuts imposed by successive governments, the Army, Navy and RAF all struggle to meet day-to-day commitments to protect this country and play their part in collective security through Nato and other defence alliances — let alone prepare for serious potential new threats.

The particular problem this time was probably down to maintenance issues.

Hulls need cleaning to stop them rusting, engines need overhauling and nuclear reactors need to be flushed.

When you don’t have very many ships, taking one or two out of circulation leaves quite a gap — in this case, one that could not be filled.

And the fact is that we don’t have enough ships any more. Or aircraft. Or tanks. Or military personnel. Not since Defence became a soft target for governments looking to cut spending.

A British army Challenger 2 Main Battle Tank, of 1 Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (1RRF), is shown returning to base after completing a firing mission as part of Exercise MedMan.
1RRF Battle group were based at the British Army Training Unit Suffield (BATUS) in Canada.
MOD photo by Mike Weston via Wikimedia Commons.

What this means on the front line is illustrated by the small but fierce battalion of 800 UK troops stationed at a remote base in the Baltic state of Estonia as a crucial part of Nato’s defences against a Russian attack. They are on their guard at all times, scouring the bleak horizon for anything suspicious.

Inside a vast metal hangar is a fleet of Challenger tanks. The Army wanted to send 18 but the MoD cut this back to ten, of which only eight can be operational because two will always be in for repairs.

Asked if this would be enough if the Russians came over the border, the men we met there shrugged and laughed. They know full well that the Russians could throw as many as 22 tank battalions — that’s more than 650 tanks — at them.

A war-gaming exercise concluded that Nato forces would be ‘woefully inadequate’ in the event of an invasion: the Russians would be in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, within 60 hours.

No wonder the men themselves refer to their assignment as ‘Operation Tethered Goat’. Hopelessly outnumbered, they would be brushed aside, sacrificed to the predatory Putin, like the goat swallowed by the T. rex in Jurassic Park.

Amazons – fierce fighting tribe or just ancient Greek porn?

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lindybeige
Published on 21 Jun 2011

You can believe in them if you want, but if you do, you should out of fairness to other mythological characters believe in giants, cyclopes, griffins, and gorgons.

www.LloydianAspects.co.uk

QotD: The Laffer Curve

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Around a certain sort of leftist mention of the Laffer Curve just brings a derisive snort. The sadness of that reaction being that it’s just an obvious mathematical truth. Tax rates of 0 % and 100 % bring in no revenue. Somewhere in between maximises the moolah. Note what isn’t being said, that all tax cuts always pay for themselves, nor even that lower tax rates are necessarily a good thing. Only that there’s some optimal level with regard to revenue collection.

All the arguments about the optimal level of government are over in the Wagner Curve and such others.

The Laffer Curve is also made up of two components, the income and substitution. Some people will work just to make their nut. Observational studies have shown that many taxi drivers do. So, increase their tax rates and they’ll work more. The substitution effect is, well, what’s that net wage worth to me? What’s the value of not working? When going fishing is worth more than working then people will go fishing. The curve as a whole is the interplay of these two effects.

Each tax in each society has its own such curve. A transactions tax of 0.01% can reduce revenue collection, as the EU’s study of a financial transactions tax shows us. Taxes upon income of 20% are below that Laffer Curve peak.

But where, exactly, is that peak for taxes upon income? The best study we’ve got, Saez and Diamond, says between 54% and 80% dependent upon other structures in the tax system. The Tory part of the UK Treasury says around 40 to 45% for income tax, plus national insurance, so at the bottom end of that S&D range. Many lefties want to say it’s higher so we can tax “the rich” more.

Tim Worstall, “How Lovely To Spot The Laffer Curve In The Wild – Doctors’ Pensions Edition”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-09-05.

September 24, 2018

Verity Stob on early GUI experiences

Filed under: History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

“Verity Stob” began writing about technology issues three decades back. She reminisces about some things that have changed and others that are still irritatingly the same:

It’s 30 years since .EXE Magazine carried the first Stob column; this is its pearl Perl anniversary. Rereading article #1, a spoof self-tester in the Cosmo style, I was struck by how distant the world it invoked seemed. For example:

    Your program requires a disk to have been put in the floppy drive, but it hasn’t. What happens next?

The original answers, such as:

    e) the program crashes out into DOS, leaving dozens of files open

would now need to be supplemented by

    f) what’s ‘the floppy drive’ already, Grandma? And while you’re at it, what is DOS? Part of some sort of DOS and DON’TS list?

I say: sufficient excuse to present some Then and Now comparisons with those primordial days of programming, to show how much things have changed – or not.

1988: Drag-and-drop was a showy-offy but not-quite-satisfactory technology.

My first DnD encounter was by proxy. In about 1985 my then boss, a wise and cynical old Brummie engineer, attended a promotional demo, free wine and nibbles, of an exciting new WIMP technology called GEM. Part of the demo was to demonstrate the use of the on-screen trash icon for deleting files.

According to Graham’s gleeful report, he stuck up his hand at this point. “What happens if you drag the clock into the wastepaper basket?’

The answer turned out to be: the machine crashed hard on its arse, and it needed about 10 minutes embarrassed fiddling to coax it back onto its feet. At which point Graham’s arm went up again. “What happens if you drop the wastepaper basket into the clock?’

Drag-ons ‘n’ drag-offs

GEM may have been primitive, but it was at least consistent.

The point became moot a few months later, when Apple won a look-and-feel lawsuit and banned the GEM trashcan outright.

2018: Not that much has changed. Windows Explorer users: how often has your mouse finger proved insufficiently strong to grasp the file? And you have accidentally dropped the document you wanted into a deep thicket of nested server directories?

Or how about touch interface DnD on a phone, where your skimming pinkie exactly masks from view the dragged thing?

Well then.

However, I do confess admiration for this JavaScript library that aims to make a dragging and dropping accessible to the blind. Can’t fault its ambition.

Drafting – Poetry – Georg von Trapp I OUT OF THE TRENCHES

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 22 Sep 2018

Chair of Wisdom Time!

Buffalo Bills shock Minnesota 27-6

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Buffalo Bills have had a rough start to the 2018 NFL season, with two bad losses (being outscored 78-23) and they faced another huge challenge visiting the Minnesota Vikings for game three. At least, that was the story line coming in to the game. It certainly didn’t describe the action after kick-off, as Buffalo looked like the only team on the field that cared about the outcome of the game. The Vikings managed to shoot themselves in the foot so often with stupid penalties that it was almost as if they were trying to lose.

I’ve been following the team for a very long time, and this was the worst game I’ve seen them play since losing the NFC Championship game 41-0 to the New York Giants back in 2000. The $84 million man came back down to earth with a thud after finishing last week’s game in Green Bay with a career-best statistical line … he just couldn’t connect with his receivers whenever the crumbling offensive line gave him enough time to find a target. With back-to-back trips coming up to Los Angeles and Philadelphia, Judd Zulgad says it’s time to sound the alarm:

Inexcusable and inexplicable.

Those are the two words (fit for a website read by people of all ages) that best describe a 16.5-point home favorite embarrassing itself with a completely inept performance against an NFL bottom-feeder starting a rookie quarterback. Yet, that’s exactly what the Minnesota Vikings did as they put on a cringe-worthy performance in a 27-6 loss to the Buffalo Bills and Josh Allen on Sunday at U.S. Bank Stadium.

How the heck did this happen?

Who cares?

Nobody wants to hear excuses when you are a favorite in the loaded NFC. You have a game on Thursday against the Rams? Who cares. Your quarterback has a terrible day? Do better. Your defense has a spotty performance for a second consecutive week? Too bad.

This Vikings team is expected to overcome any adversity it might face. Instead, they spent Sunday looking like a hopeless collection of lost causes that in no way resembled a contender. The Vikings were supposed to be up 27-0 at halftime, not trailing by that margin. The most competent performance at U.S. Bank came as many in the crowd of 66,800 booed their heroes off the field at halftime.

Many of them streamed to the exits with 11 minutes, 27 seconds left in the fourth quarter after the Vikings couldn’t even complete a simple fourth-and-1 pass from Cousins to C.J. Ham. They would have been wise and justified to head out far earlier. The Vikings’ only touchdown of the game came with 2:59 left in the fourth quarter when Kirk Cousins found Kyle Rudolph on a 4-yard pass that meant nothing.

When the game did matter, the Vikings made it unwatchable.

Not all of the Vikings’ troubles begin on the offensive line, but a lot of them can be traced back to that:

No push from the line means no gaps for running backs to run through, and if they’re being pushed back into the quarterback (as they were far too often), it hobbles the short passing game, too. Last season, Case Keenum’s escape ability made all the difference, but Kirk Cousins is much more of a pure pocket passer, so if the pressure gets to him, he’s more likely to be sacked or have to throw the ball away. Cousins ended the day with a stat line of 40 of 55 for 296 yards, a touchdown and an interception and took four sacks (it seemed like a lot more than just four for fans watching the game). However, most of those yards came late in the game when the outcome was no longer in much doubt.

The Vikings special teams did absolutely nothing to help the situation, between stupid penalties and some real head-scratching decisions about bringing the ball out of the end zone and when to field punts. If the other parts of the team were performing well, it would merely have been a distraction, but the deficits on special teams made it that much tougher to try to climb back into the game after the first quarter. You don’t tend to think of the kick return or punt return roles as being very important, but if Marcus Sherels had been healthy enough to play, I don’t think we’d have noticed just how much special teams issues added to the disaster … because Sherels has better decision-making skills than his backups.

The Daily Norseman‘s Ted Glover has apparently been deported to Africa or something, as Christopher Gates appears to have taken over his slot for the weekly post-game Stock Market Report:

Hey, kids! Yours truly has the Stock Market Report for the next couple of weeks, because Ted is blessing the rains down in Africa or something or other on vacation. I’m assuming that nobody has told Ted that Africa has snakes, because if they had I’d think that the midwestern United States would be just about as close as Ted would get to the place.

But, even though I’m making jokes at Ted’s expense, at least he had the good sense not to sit down and subject himself to the absolute hot mess of a garbage pile of a dumpster fire of a complete freaking disaster that the rest of us subjected ourselves to on Sunday afternoon. How bad was it for the Minnesota Vikings at U.S. Bank Stadium on Sunday against the Buffalo Bills?

Parenthetically, I sure hope that Ted has trained a brilliant understudy/novice/padawan to cover Zim Tzu’s weekly press conferences, because if not I’m sure lots of the fans will be demanding their money back from Daily Norseman — how else are we supposed to decode the koans of Zim Tzu without his brilliant decryption efforts? But, as usual, I digress. Skipping right to the essential Buy/Sell recommendations:

Buy: John DeFilippo let this game get away from him – To say that the Minnesota Vikings’ play calling was unbalanced on Sunday would be the ultimate understatement. In 65 offensive plays on Sunday, the Minnesota Vikings had six rushes. Two of those runs came from Kirk Cousins on scrambles, which means that the Vikings called four designed runs on Sunday afternoon against the Bills.

Four. As in, like, one per quarter. Mike Boone and Latavius Murray had two carries each. That was it.

I know that Dalvin Cook sat this one out, but seriously … there needs to be some sort of balance there, even when the game gets out of hand early.

Sell: John DeFilippo isn’t a great offensive coordinator – That having been said, I do think that DeFilippo is a good offensive coordinator overall. He’s shown a lot of things to be excited about over the first few weeks of the season, and I think that a game like this is going to prove to be the exception rather than the rule for him going forward. Besides, he didn’t make Kirk Cousins cough up those fumbles and put the offense in a terrible position early. Much like Bob Schnelker, that was not John DeFilippo’s fault.

Buy: The Minnesota Vikings have a lot of talented defensive players – It’s hard to deny that the Vikings have numerous talented players on the defensive side of the football. Guys like Danielle Hunter and Linval Joseph and Harrison Smith and Xavier Rhodes are all among the best in the NFL at their positions. There are as many talented players on the Minnesota Vikings’ defense as there are on any other defense in the National Football League.

Sell: The Minnesota Vikings are one of the best defenses in the National Football League – Having said that, something has happened to this team and they’re not even close to anything resembling a “great” defense. Not anymore. They fell apart in the second half against New Orleans, they fell apart against Philadelphia, they weren’t great against San Francisco, they weren’t great against Green Bay, and they damn sure weren’t great today against Buffalo. They still have the reputation of being a great defense, certainly, but as of right now they’re coasting on that reputation a bit.

Buy: Mike Hughes has all the skills to be a great return man – We’ve seen all the highlights, and we know that part of the reason the Vikings liked him coming out of college was because of his potential ability as a return specialist.

Sell: Mike Hughes needs to bring every kickoff out of the end zone – Having said that, Mike Hughes is not Percy Harvin or Cordarrelle Patterson. Yes, I know the Vikings were looking for a spark today. However, on the three returns that Hughes brought out of the end zone on Sunday, he failed to reach the 25 on any of them, and on two of the three the Vikings were penalized, pushing them back to inside their own 10-yard line. Sometimes it’s okay to just take the ball at the 25-yard line. Somebody needs to tell him that.

Buy: This is one of the most embarrassing losses in recent regular season history – All of the indications were that the Vikings should have won this game in a big way. The Bills got throttled in their season opener and didn’t look great in Week 2, either. The Vikings were at home, they looked to be the better and more talented team on paper, and they were looking to bounce back after their tie against the Green Bay Packers in Week 2. But, that didn’t happen.

Sell: The 2018 season is over – That said, this is Week 3. Yes, the Vikings have two very difficult road games coming up. Yes, it’s very possible that this team could be 1-3-1 after those two games. But this team does have talent, and although this is humiliating and not at all what we were expecting, there’s still a lot of football to be played. The Vikings have to make some adjustments and get some things straightened out, but it’s only September. At least, that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself.

It’ll be interesting to see just how far down the “power tables” this game will push the Vikings. They were pretty consistently in the top tier during the preseason and through the first few games of the regular season, but this result is bound to drag their ratings down across the board — and deservedly so. If they lose the next two road games (against the Rams this Thursday and the Eagles the following weekend), they’ll be lucky to stay in the top half of the rankings.

How To Make Clamp Racks & Organize the Shop

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jon Peters Art & Home
Published on 11 Jul 2014

Check out our new website: http://jonpeters.com/

Here’s a video on building a rack system for storing your clamps in your work space or shop.

QotD: Entrepreneurs

Filed under: Business, Economics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We need entrepreneurs to decide what to do.The only alternative is governmental bureaucracy, which is good for national defense and a few other things, but very bad at most of what we do, from room rental to rock music. The entrepreneuseonly succeeds if people like what she does, and agree voluntarily to pay for it. A free society is one of choice. Entrepreneurs give choice, bureaucrats crush it.

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, “Why We Need to Admire Entrepreneurs”, Peace Love Liberty, 2018-09.

September 23, 2018

The Nimrod MRA4 – the world’s most expensive bad aircraft

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Back in 2011, I posted an article about the retirement of the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod from the Royal Air Force inventory. I referred to the Nimrod as

… expensive to buy, eye-wateringly expensive to upgrade, but it must be cheap to operate, right? No:

    […] our new fleet of refurbished De Havilland Comet subhunters (sorry, “Nimrod MRA4s”) will cost at least £700m a year to operate. If we put the whole Nimrod force on the scrapheap for which they are so long overdue right now, by the year 2019 we will have saved […] £7bn

The Register certainly got in the right ballpark with this helpful graphic:

Earlier this month, the Nimrod saga was detailed at Naval Gazing, if only as a way to show that someone can have worse procurement experiences than the United States military. Despite being a military development of a passenger jet famous for crashes, the initial marks of the Nimrod were able to meet the RAF’s needs. The problems began when a requirement was generated for a British AWACS aircraft and the Nimrod was deemed to be the best candidate for conversion (“best” probably meaning “only British competitor”):

Things began to go wrong in the mid-70s, when the British decided to introduce an AWACS aircraft to support their air defense efforts. They had several options. The E-2 Hawkeye and E-3 Sentry were both about to enter service, and were rapidly proving themselves to have excellent radar systems during trials. The British could have had either aircraft, or bought their radar systems to integrate into an aircraft of their own. Or they could have only bought a few subcomponents, like the antenna or the radar transmitter itself, and built the rest domestically.

They decided to take none of these options. Instead, they would produce an entirely new radar system. Instead of an American-style radome, separate antennas would be installed in the nose and tail, and the system would sweep through one, and then the other. This was far more expensive and much riskier than buying from the Americans, but it did produce a lot more jobs in the British defense industry, which was apparently the government’s prime concern. In 1977, a contract was placed, making BAE and GEC-Marconi co-leads on the project to convert 11 surplus Nimrod MR1 airframes to the new configuration.

As might be expected based on that kind of decision-making, the resulting airplane had problems. The computer system chosen wasn’t powerful enough to integrate all of the data, particularly the area where the nose and tail radars overlapped. It was also horribly unreliable, with a mean time between failures of only two hours, in a system which took 2.5 hours to load the mission data from the tape. The Nimrod, considerably smaller than the American Sentry, was unable to carry more equipment to solve this problem. Different electronics racks were earthed to different points in the airframe, and the resulting potential differences caused false tracks to appear, overloading the computer even more. To make matters worse, most of the electronics units weren’t interchangeable for reasons that were never entirely clear. If one unit failed, several spares had to be tried before one that worked was found. The only system that functioned reliably was the IFF system, which could only track friendly aircraft and airliners. This was a major handicap in an aircraft intended to detect incoming Soviet bombers.

It probably isn’t a surprise to hear that the planes were delayed. A lot. And delaying military projects tends to drive the overall price higher. What was anticipated to be a £200-300 million project was over £1 billion before the government of the day came to their fiscal senses and pulled the plug (they ended up buying Boeing E-3 Sentry aircraft instead).

A few years later, the RAF ran a competition to replace the Nimrod MR2 maritime patrol aircraft. Lockheed, Dassault and Airbus entered the competition, but somehow, the RAF ended up selecting BAE’s bid which involved rebuilding 30-year-old Nimrod frames with new electronics and all the modern conveniences.

RAF Nimrod MRA4 on 18 July 2009.
Detail of original photo by Ronnie Macdonald, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1996, a contract was issued for the new aircraft, designated Nimrod MRA4. 21 aircraft were to be produced at a cost of £2.8 billion, and they would be essentially new airplanes, with only the fuselage structure being retained. The antique Spey engines would be replaced with modern BR700s. These engines were significantly larger, and required much more air, forcing BAE to design a new, larger wing. The combined effect of these two changes was to double the Nimrod’s range and improve performance. Inside, the flight deck was replaced with one derived from the A340 airliner, and the mission systems were to be all-new.

A fuselage was sent to be reverse-engineered for the design of the new wing, and BAE designed and built it, then pulled in another aircraft to make the modification. And discovered that the wing didn’t fit. Apparently, the problem dated back to the initial construction of the aircraft. When positioning the frames, Hawker Siddeley had not done what all sensible manufacturers did, and measured from a common baseline. Instead, they had positioned each frame with a tolerance relative to the previous one, which meant that the position of the wings varied by as much as a foot across the fleet. Worse, the aircraft they had designed the wings for was one of the most extreme in wing position, so the new wings didn’t fit most of the other aircraft. This forced a redesign of the wings, further delaying the program.

Spoiler: they missed their delivery deadline. By nearly a decade. And the original plan to build 21 aircraft shrank to only 4 … but the budget continued to grow, from the original £2.8 billion to over £4.1 billion at cancellation. Each of the surviving airframes had literally cost more than £1 billion. That’s why Bean gave the Nimrod his “Naval Gazing Worst Procurement Ever” trophy, and I think it was very well-deserved.

The Russians are Coming! – WW2 004 September 22 1939

Filed under: Europe, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published on 22 Sep 2018

When the USSR crushes the plans of the Allies for Poland and the Japanese plans in China in the same week, it is Germany that benefits.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
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Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Research by: Indy Neidell
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A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH

How to use the stock market as a scorecard during a trade war

Filed under: Business, China, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains how even the financial journalists at Fortune are misunderstanding what the changes in stock market values mean during Trump’s ongoing trade disputes with China:

… how stock markets react is not a good guide to the positive effects of tariffs. Quite the opposite in fact. It’s a much better guide to how we’re all getting screwed by tariffs. That is, the better the US stock market does the more evidence we’ve got of the bad effects of tariffs and a trade war.

Think on it. Why is Trump imposing tariffs? To protect American business from competition by those dastardly foreigners. Who loses in the absence of competition from the Yellow Peril? Those American consumers who would have bought those better/cheaper Chinese goods if they were able to. Who gains from tariffs? American businesses who can now gouge the American consumer a little more in the absence of those items imported from East Asia.

So, a rise in the US stock market is a guide to how much more profit American business can screw out of the American public. It’s a measure, a reasonably good and precise one too, of how much we the people are losing from the trade war and tariffs. More exactly, it’s the capitalised value of the ongoing losses we’re suffering from this restriction of our choices, the competition those who supply us face.

That is, the better the stock market performance the higher those costs and the more we’re losing the trade war. That is, as long as you accept that it is consumers, not producers, that matter, but then that’s the standard economic assumption ever since Adam Smith even if it gets lost in Washington DC often enough.

The US stock market rising in response to US tariffs is evidence of the losses from tariffs, not the gains.

30 Years War | 3 Minute History

Filed under: Europe, France, Germany, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Jabzy
Published on 28 Oct 2015

Thanks to Xios, Alan Haskayne, Lachlan Lindenmayer, William Crabb, Derpvic, Seth Reeves and all my other Patrons. If you want to help out – https://www.patreon.com/Jabzy?ty=h

QotD: “Buggered up a perfectly good monkey”

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

[The title] is a somewhat sanitised version of a punchline to an Internet meme I saw sometime back, which (if I remember correctly) goes something like this:

GOD: “Behold! I have created Mankind!”
Angel: “You [deleted]-up a perfectly good monkey is what you did. Look at him — he’s got anxiety!”

The meme goes on for a bit, and ends with the angel begging God to turn Man back in to a monkey.

Anyhoo, the punchline kind of stuck in my head — apparently it’s weird in there — and I have found that it is a wonderful comment for the occasions when “WTF?! Really?! W.T.F?!” just won’t do.

As a for instance, let us say you are observing a scene in which several laws of physics have been violated in a way only possible by a combination of an overabundance of hormones divided by an under-appreciation of mortality. Fire that is guaranteed to not be possible is possibly occurring, and something — probably important — is in a physical location that there is no sodding way for that something to be in. The young — they’re always young these days — person responsible is standing in front of you, twiddling their fingers in such a way as to suggest that the report that is about to cross your desk is going to be one of the more impressive works of speculative fiction/nitwittery you will read since … well, the last one … lacking only in the mention of the beer that someone was holding during the entire episode.

I find that glaring at the responsible party over your glasses, then performing a Migraine Salute while gritting out, “Yeee-up. Cocked-up a perfectly good monkey” manages to be completely apropos, yet just profane enough to properly convey my feelings on such occasions.

LawDog, “Because esoteric makes me warm and fuzzy”, The LawDog Files, 2016-12-09.

September 22, 2018

Arthur C. Clarke – Master of Science Fiction – Extra Sci Fi – #1

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

Extra Credits
Published on 18 Sep 2018

Arthur C. Clarke is well known for his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, but even more importantly he ventured into writing novels instead of just magazine serializations. Works like The City and the Stars asked big philosophical questions in science fiction.

“This is the religion of Wokeness, and this is the era of the Great Awokening”

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

Have you heard the word of Social Justice? Social Justice can save you, you know:

From the sun-blanched beaches of California to the snow-covered cities of New England, a religious fervor is sweeping the United States. PhD-toting preachers spread the faith with righteous zeal, denouncing those who violate its sacred principles. Sinners are threatened not by an angry god, but by a righteous mob. The impenitent among them are condemned to be outcasts, while the contrite, if they properly mortify themselves and pledge everlasting fealty to the faith, can secure enough lost status to rejoin society, perhaps forever marked by a scarlet epithet. Racist. Sexist. Ableist. This is the religion of Wokeness, and this is the era of the Great Awokening.

In the following article, we will explore this quasi-religion, Wokeness, as a status system that functions predominantly to distinguish white elites from the white masses (whom we will call hoi polloi). It does this by offering a rich signalling vocabulary for traits and possessions such as education, intelligence, openness, leisure, wealth, and cosmopolitanism, all of which educated elites value (for a similar analysis, see Rehain Selam’s August essay in the Atlantic, discussed by David French in the National Review article linked above). From this perspective, the preachers of the Great Awokening — those who most ardently and eloquently articulate the principles of Wokeness — obtain status because they (a) signal the possession of desired traits and (b) promulgate a powerful narrative that legitimizes the status disparity between white elites and hoi polloi. The elites, according to these preachers, are morally righteous and therefore deserve status, whereas hoi polloi are morally backward and deserve obloquy and derision.

It’s important to note before we begin that this perspective does not contend that all the actors in this status system are cynical charlatans. In fact, it insists that many legitimately believe their assertions about pervasive racism, sexism, transphobia, et cetera, and feel compelled to preach their doctrine so as to make society more just. Sincere belief and status motives often conspire. For example, the famous preachers of the Great Awakening (from whom we derived our title) almost certainly believed the urgency of their message and the elaborate metaphysics of their faith, but also obtained status from their books and sermons.

Wokeness

Before analyzing Wokeness as a status system, we must understand it as a quasi-religious doctrine. Unlike scientific theories or other empirical claims, the basic tenets of Wokeness are held with sacred fervor. Those who challenge them are not debated; rather, their motives are denounced, and they are cast out of polite society like heretics. To take just one example, when someone objects to the Woke principle that “diversity is a strength,” committed believers rarely greet the objection as an opportunity for argument. Instead, they attack the apostate for his sacrilege, and accuse him of unspeakable moral treachery (see table below for other examples).

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