The Great War
Published on 15 Oct 2018A Prussian Quartermaster General and a Bavarian Crown Prince. The tactician in the east and the strategist in the west. Two deeply different characters and approaches to warfare. Erich Ludendorff and Rupprecht of Bavaria.
October 16, 2018
Crown Prince Rupprecht & Erich Ludendorff – Westerner vs. Easterner I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?
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Modernism and the “so-called international style … is the blight of Germany (and of almost everywhere else where it has been tried)”
Theodore Dalrymple on the awful concrete-and-glass monoliths of modern architecture, especially those designs by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Gropius:
The modernism and so-called international style that is the blight of Germany (and of almost everywhere else where it has been tried, which is almost everywhere in the world), and which the author of the article appears to think is apolitical, was hardly without its intellectual, ideological, and political foundations.
And what hideous intellectual, ideological, and political foundations they were! The great figures of modernism — great, that is, in the scope and degree of their baleful influence, not great in artistic or aesthetic merit — were from the first totalitarian in spirit. They were toadies to the rich and bullies to the poor; they were communists and fascists (not in the merely metaphorical sense, either), and by a mixture of ardent self-promotion, bureaucratic scheming, and intellectual terrorism managed to gain virtual control of the world’s schools of architecture. Just try saying in a French architectural school what is perfectly obvious, that Le Corbusier was not a genius except in self-advertisement, that his fascist ideas were repugnant, that he regarded humans in his cities much as we all regard bedbugs in beds, that during the Occupation he suggested deporting millions of people from Paris because he thought they had no business to be there, that his designs were incompetent, and that his constructions were instinct with and the very embodiment of his odious ideas, and see how far you get up the academic ladder! (How, incidentally, were the world’s most beautiful cities and buildings erected without the aid of architectural schools?) Anyone interested in the ideological foundations, as well as effects, of architectural modernism should read James Stevens Curl’s recently published Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism (Oxford), a magisterial and to me unanswerable account of one of the greatest aesthetic disasters to have befallen Europe in all its history. A single modernist building in a townscape is like a dead mouse in a bowl of soup, that is to say you cannot very well ignore it however splendid its surroundings may otherwise be.
Ah, you might protest, we have moved on from Mies van der Rohe et al., and so we have. (By the way, Professor Curl is very amusing on the opportunistic evolution of Mies van der Rohe’s name, as well as his equally opportunistic passage from being pro-Nazi to purely careerist refugee from Nazism.) Nonetheless two things need to be said about this supposed moving on from modernism to postmodernism and other isms: first that the damage, reparable only by demolition on a vast and inconceivable scale, has been done, and second that change is not by itself necessarily for the better. The capacity of eminent architects to spend vast sums of money to build aesthetic monstrosities fit to make Vitruvius weep is illustrated by the Whitney Museum in New York and the Philharmonie in Paris, the latter in particular of truly astonishing hideousness, that would have been almost comical had it not absorbed and wasted so much money, in the process becoming for many generations of the future as pleasing an aesthetic experience as a foreign body in the eye.
Philharmonie at the Parc de la Villette, Paris.
Photo by Zairon via Wikimedia Commons.
The mystery is how and why the patrons, those who choose the designs, stand for it. The key, I suppose, is to be found in Hans Christian Andersen — the Emperor’s New Clothes. The patrons are afraid to be thought by the architects not to understand: an accusation that Le Corbusier leveled decades ago at all those who did not approve of his plans to destroy old cities and cover the world with an ocean of raw concrete and a forest of almost identical towers. In other words, it is intellectual and moral cowardice that makes the world go round.
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Julie d’Aubigny – Duelist, Singer, Radical – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 13 Oct 2018Julie d’Aubigny lived during an unusual time in 17th-century France when political and cultural norms were shifting. She was allowed to exist openly as a bisexual woman pursuing her swordsmanship and singing talents in the court of King Louis XIV.
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Fast food outlets cluster in poorer areas – because they’re low-margin businesses
Tim Worstall debunks the “fast food restaurants are preying on the poor” myth:
Contrary to the musings of Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times there is a cause and effect going on over the placings of fast food restaurants or outlets in British towns. The provision of burnt chicken and maybemeatburgers to the hoi polloi is a hugely competitive business. This means that it is also low margin. So, where do you put the places that are in a low margin line of business?
[…] this is about clustering of those nosh joints. Why are they in the poor areas? Well, for the same reason the poor are in the poor areas. They’re cheap. This being rather the defining point about poor people, they look for cheap places to live. The two are therefore synonymous, poor and cheap. And what is it we’ve just said about nosh? That it’s a low margin business. Therefore purveyors of the deep fried and battered saveloy – that joy of the ages – are going to be clustered in the poor part of town where they can afford the rents.
And that’s our cause and effect. Some poor people are poor because they’re, or have been, ill. They’re in the cheap part of town because they’re poor. Fried gut shops are in poor areas because they don’t make much money therefore they’re in the poor part of town. Absolutely any analysis of the phenomenon which doesn’t account for this is wrong. And no analysis done by anyone does take account of it – therefore all current analyses of the point are indeed wrong.
There are also other factors to consider, including the fact that poor people are less likely to have the ability or facilities to prepare their own meals (or the habit of cooking for themselves), so the easy availability of high-calorie fast food or snacks is rather important to them. When you’re hungry and don’t have a fridge or freezer full of food at home, a burger or fried chicken has a much stronger appeal than it does to more wealthy folks with well-stocked pantries. If you’ve been raised on high-fat/high-salt foods, the “healthier” alternatives may not appeal, as they also are less flavourful than their fast food options.
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Bren vs Spandau – which was better?
Lindybeige
Published on 15 May 2016The Bren gun and the Spandau were rather different, and each the prime infantry weapon of its army. Was one better?
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After reading the comments, I shall respond with the following, because the same few points were coming up again and again:
1. The two weapons were both section MGs. This makes them comparable. The standard infantry section of a British Commonwealth infantry unit had one Bren per section, and the standard German equivalent had one Spandau. Yes, they were in other ways different weapons. That is largely my point. If they were almost identical in performance and use, then there would be no video to make. The comparison is only interesting because they were different.
2. Yes, I am well aware that there are descendants of the Spandau still around today, notably the MG 74 and MG 3. I never said otherwise. I was talking about the Bren and the Spandau in the context of WW2, when they went up against each other.
3. I say things in praise of both weapons in this video, and point out short-comings of both, and conclude that they were both fit for purpose. I reject, therefore, accusations of bias one way or the other. The usual thing one hears/reads is that the Bren was rubbish and the Spandau excellent, and the reality was more complicated than that.
4. I concede that when I mention some of the good things about one gun, it may imply to some that these things were lacking in the other. For example, I mention that it was easy to change the barrel on a Bren, which some people have mistakenly interpreted as my saying that it was awkward to change the barrel on an MG 42, which it wasn’t.
5. Yes, very obviously there were more factors than Bren guns that explain the advance of the Allies in in 1944/5 in the west. However, the point I make is that the front advanced towards Berlin every day, and this can only happen if infantry are moving forward, and taking and holding that ground. Artillery and air support cannot do this. It is also a way of countering the too-often-repeated notion that the Germans were better troops with better equipment. Yes, the best German troops were excellent, but let us not forget that they lost. If they were consistently better troops with better equipment, then they would not so consistently have lost.
6. Yes, there were differences between the MG34 and the MG42 more than simplicity of manufacture. The MG42 had a higher rate of fire, for example. I lumped them together at the start of the video for convenience. They served the same battlefield role, and were used with the same doctrine. After-action reports written at the time, and memoirs written afterwards almost never differentiate between them. Everything I say about the relative merits of Bren and Spandau are true for both MG34 and MG42, which both fired substantially faster than a Bren, and were both belt-fed.
7. The name ‘Spandau’ originally referred to the MG 08 used in World War One. It was made at the factory in Spandau, a borough of Berlin. The nick-name then got transferred to the machine guns used by the Germans in WW2. It was a misnomer in that the MG 34 and MG 42 were not made in Spandau, as I say in the video, but it is still a good word to refer to the two weapons since it is quick, clear, and was the term used at the time.
8. Yes, the MG 34 was accurate enough for purpose. Had it not been, I would have been sure to mention that. With a new and cool barrel, fired single shot, the MG34, with its double-crescent trigger, lacking in the MG42, could indeed be decently accurate. However, the barrel quickly got hot and worn, and more importantly, that was not the doctrine of use. The gun was designed to put plenty of rounds down against the enemy. Also — psychology. Give a man a gun that can spray bullets really effectively, suppressing his foes and thus keeping him safe, while making a really impressive noise, and he will use it this way, but accuracy will suffer. Give a man a slow-firing MG with a magazine of 28 rounds, and he will take careful aim and fire far fewer bullets, but with greater accuracy.
Musical stings kindly contributed by David Bevan.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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QotD: I’m All Right Jack
I’m All Right Jack is a film delicately poised between two very different cultural moments. The opening scene looks back to the war, the heyday of collective endeavour and national solidarity, but the song — both in content and style — seems to look forward to a new era of aggressive hedonism and unashamed self-interest.
At the time, though, what attracted most attention was Peter Sellers’s hilarious performance as the obstreperous trade unionist Fred Kite (“We do not and cannot accept the principle that incompetence justifies dismissal”), which delighted many cinemagoers and won him a BAFTA. Not surprisingly, it went down very badly with union leaders and left-wing reviewers, but the Boultings were unrepentant. In an article for the Daily Express, they explained their reasoning:
As individuals we believe in Britain because Britain has always stood for the individual.
Nowadays there seem to be two sacred cows — Big Business and Organized Labour. Both are deep in a conspiracy against the individual — to force us to accept certain things for what in fact they are not. Both are busy feathering their nests most of the time. And to hell with the rest of us…
AFter all, who is King in the Welfare State? That humourless, faceless monster — the official, the bureaucrat, the combine executive.
Certainly a great deal has changed since we used to be Angry Men before the war … But at the end of this huge revolution we are not so sure that the losses have not been as great as the gains.
For example, the tendency to think of people not as human beings but as part of a group, a bloc, a class.
The Boultings knew, of course, that this would annoy some poeple. But the great strength of the “average Briton”, they insisted, lay in “laughing at his leaders and institutions. We believe our films reflect the popular attitude and mood. Their success seems to prove our point.”
Since I’m All Right Jack is in black and white, it is easy to forget how bracingly modern it must have seemed, not just to the Queen and Harold Macmillan, but to the large audiences who flocked to see it in the autumn of 1959. It was released only ten years after Passport to Pimlico, but the difference in mood and tone can hardly be exaggerated. It is not just a question of colletivism versus individualism, but the social context that those two ideas reflected. The Ealing film was made against a background of austerity; the Boultings’ film is drenched in consumerism. In the early scenes of Passport to Pimlico, we find ourselves in a world of rationing and restrictions, bomb damage and dereliction. What kicks off the action, in fact, is the accidental detonation of an unexploded German bomb. But I’m All Right Jack is set in the late 1950s, a world awash with appliances and advertising, in which wartime austerity is merely a fading memory. The narrator tells us that at long last “industry, spurred by the march of science in all directions, was working at high pressure to supply those viatl needs for which the people had hungered for so long”. But when Ian Carmichael’s blundering hero gets a job in industrial management, he soon finds out what these “vital needs” are: Num-Yum chocolate bars and Detto washing powder, each with its own irritatingly catchy jingle.
Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of our National Imagination, 2015.
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October 15, 2018
German Afghanistan Mission I OUT OF THE ETHER
The Great War
Published on 13 Oct 2018Thank you again Jack Sharpe!
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Arizona Cardinals 17, Minnesota Vikings 27, as the Vikings discover you’re still allowed to run the ball
The Cardinals finally got their first win of the season last weekend and came into Minneapolis hoping to get their second. The Vikings, returning home after a hard-fought win against the defending Superbowl champion Philadelphia Eagles were just hoping that they didn’t have a relapse to the Buffalo game a few weeks back.
The Vikings had to re-shuffle their offensive line yet again, as starting left tackle Riley Reiff was unable to suit up for the game with a foot injury, so Rashod Hill slid over to the left side and rookie Brian O’Neill got his first NFL start on the right. Despite the change, the line was able to open some gaps for running back Latavius Murray (starting in place of the injured Dalvin Cook) who logged the Vikings’ first rushing touchdown and first 100-yard rushing game this season. That didn’t mean that quarterback Kirk Cousins was untroubled by the Cardinal pass rush: he had several passes batted down at the line and he was sacked four times and lost a fumble that Cards safety Budda Baker scooped and ran back for a defensive touchdown (and a tie game). The Vikings took a 3-point lead into the half, and then dominated most of the second half both statistically and on the scoreboard. The Cardinals put together one efficient scoring drive, but that was all they could muster.
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Forgotten History: Glade of the Armistice
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 25 Sep 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Here at a forested railroad crossing outside Compiègne in Picardy, France, two rail cars met in November of 1918 – one with members of the Allied/Entente high commend and ones with representatives of Imperial Germany. They met here to end 5 years of slaughter; the German delegation being presented terms for armistice by the Allies. Faced with no other viable option, they would accept these terms, and the fighting officially ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day or the 11th month of 1918. More than a year would go by before the Treaty of Versailles was fully ratified, but it was here that the decision to end the death was made.
The rail car in which the papers were signed was kept as a monument here, along with a rather pointed monument to the French dead, featuring a slain German Imperial eagle. A large stone message was also put up in the center of the clearing, reading (in translation):
“Here on the 11th of November 1918 succumbed the criminal pride of the German reich, vanquished by the free peoples which it tried to enslave.”
When France signed an armistice with Germany in 1940, Hitler would have those papers signed here as well, in that very same rail car. The car was then taken to Berlin as a trophy, and the monuments here destroyed. The car itself was burned accidentally in 1945, but the monuments were rebuilt by the French following the war, and a sister car is now on display here with many of the original artifacts of the Armistice (which were hidden from the Germans in 1940).
Thanks to Military History Tours for making this video possible!
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QotD: Bureaucracies
… bureaucracies have lives and characters of their own, irrespective of the sort of men they employ. The public schools are made up mostly of good people, but they don’t work very well. One imagines that most IRS agents are scrupulous and dedicated. (The DMV people just hate us.)
Kevin D. Williamson, “Agents and Agencies: Donald Trump should push for intelligence reform”, National Review, 2017-01-06.
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October 14, 2018
The Baltic in Stalin’s Squeeze – WW2 – 007 13 October 1939
World War Two
Published on 13 Oct 2018While the Third Reich and USSR consolidate their Polish conquest, their leaders are wary of each other but turn the attention to the next prize. Stalin moves to the North and Hitler pushes for an attack in the West.
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Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvWritten 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
Edited by: Spartacus Olsson and Ben OllerenshawColorized Pictures by Spartacus Olsson, Olga Shirnina and Norman Stewart
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NPCs belong in video games or Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, not in the real world
Brandon Morse on a term that’s migrated out of its original gaming context and being used as a label for social justice warriors:
If you’ve ever picked up a video game that features other characters that are controlled by the computer, then you’ve run into non-player characters or NPC’s.
NPC’s serve a host of different functions depending on what the program you’re playing with needs them for. They’re the villagers in Skyrim, Toad from Super Mario Brothers, and the ghosts in Pac-Man. NPC’s may have dialogue, patterns, and personality, but at the end of the day, they’re just a program with pre-set behavioral patterns decided for them by a developer.Now let’s pretend we’re taking this article from the top…
If you’ve ever stepped onto a college campus or a protest demonstration that features people with neon colored hair screaming at the top of their lungs about identity politics or a social concern then you’ve run into a social justice warrior or SJW.
SJWs serve a host of different functions depending on what activists, politicians and the media need them for. They’re the crazed people trying to beat down the Supreme Court door, the Antifa members threatening motorists, or the male-feminist roundhousing a woman for expressing pro-life views. SJW’s may have dialogue, patterns, and personality, but at the end of the day, they’re just a program with pre-set behavioral patterns decided for them by professors, activist groups, or the media.
The comparison between NPC’s and SJW’s is pretty striking and simultaneously hilarious.
H/T to David Thompson for the link.
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Brendan O’Neill: The Tyrannical Idea of “HATE SPEECH”
PhilosophyInsights
Published on 27 Aug 2017Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked Online and a columnist for The Australian and The Big Issue. This is part of a discussion of hate speech at spiked‘s campus-censorship conference, The New Intolerance on Campus.
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QotD: Variant forms of Kafkatrapping
Sometimes the kafkatrap is presented in less direct forms. A common variant, which I’ll call the Model C, is to assert something like this: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, …}, you are guilty because you have benefited from the {sinful, racist, sexist, homophobic, oppressive, …} behavior of others in the system.” The aim of the Model C is to induce the subject to self-condemnation not on the basis of anything the individual subject has actually done, but on the basis of choices by others which the subject typically had no power to affect. The subject must at all costs be prevented from noticing that it is not ultimately possible to be responsible for the behavior of other free human beings.
A close variant of the model C is the model P: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, …}, you are guilty because you have a privileged position in the {sinful, racist, sexist, homophobic, oppressive, …} system.” For the model P to work, the subject must be prevented from noticing that the demand to self-condemn is not based on the subject’s own actions or choices or feelings, but rather on an in-group identification ascribed by the operator of the kafkatrap.
It is essential to the operation of all three of the variants of the kafkatrap so far described that the subject’s attention be deflected away from the fact that no wrongdoing by the subject, about which the subject need feel personally guilty, has actually been specified. The kafkatrapper’s objective is to hook into chronic self-doubt in the subject and inflate it, in much the same way an emotional abuser convinces a victim that the abuse is deserved – in fact, the mechanism is identical. Thus kafkatrapping tends to work best on weak and emotionally vulnerable personalities, and poorly on personalities with a strong internalized ethos.
In addition, the success of a model P kafkatrap depends on the subject not realizing that the group ascription pinned on by the operator can be rejected. The subject must be prevented from asserting his or her individuality and individual agency; better, the subject must be convinced that asserting individuality is yet another demonstration of denial and guilt. Need it be pointed out how ironic this is, given that kafkatrappers (other than old-fashioned religious authoritarians) generally claim to be against group stereotyping?
There are, of course, other variants. Consider the model S: “Skepticism about any particular anecdotal account of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, …}, or any attempt to deny that the particular anecdote implies a systemic problem in which you are one of the guilty parties, is itself sufficient to establish your guilt.” Again, the common theme here is that questioning the discourse that condemns you, condemns you. This variant differs from the model A and model P in that a specific crime against an actual person usually is in fact alleged. The operator of the kafkatrap relies on the subject’s emotional revulsion against the crime to sweep away all questions of representativeness and the basic fact that the subject didn’t do it.
Eric S. Raymond, “Kafkatrapping”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-07-18.
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October 13, 2018
On the cusp of legalization
Colby Cosh finally gets to take a victory lap:
On Thursday the marijuana company Sundial Growers held a ribbon-cutting for its new grow-op in the Alberta town of Olds. I am not sure whether “grow-op” is an acceptable word in the new setting of giant legal cannabis cultivation facilities, but let’s stick with it, if only to call attention to the extraordinariness of what we are witnessing this month in Canada. The launch was held in a small office, and Sundial only received its cultivation licence from Health Canada on Sept. 14, but the first fruits of its pot business are already budding in a room nearby.
The company intends to have a 500,000-square-foot growing facility built in 2019, but its press release points out that it can add more space quickly. I might have been stopped short by the spectacle of the mayor and the (United Conservative) MLA rejoicing as a CEO explained the details of his craft weed business and remarked on plans for a “Sweet Jesus” varietal. But what really struck me is something the mayor said: When the company is up and fully running, he observed, it is going to hire 500 people in Olds, becoming the town’s largest single employer. Olds is, of course, home to Olds College, a century-old agriculture and food research institute: this was a major reason for the new marijuana industry to locate there.
How long ago would this scene — being played, as it is, in a naturally conservative part of the Alberta hinterland — have seemed like science fiction or parody? The Sundial facility is dwarfed by the 800,000-square-foot Aurora Sky factory, strategically located near Edmonton’s awkwardly remote international airport in the suburb of Nisku. Everyone who has ever tried to flee Edmonton or come to it through that airport has complained about its preposterous distance from the capital’s downtown, but this turns out to have an unimagined advantage. You can build a spacious agri-pharmaceutical facility at low cost practically next to the runway, establish an ultra-secure, ultra-short supply chain, and presto hemp-o: overnight response to a worldwide medical market for cannabis products becomes a snap.
I am someone who is entitled to a victory lap for having insisted years ago that we were not, as a country, properly imagining the dimensions of a legally unleashed cannabis industry. We had no idea how much economic activity was being annihilated by a perverse, illogical feature of criminal law. Maybe it is time, as Finally Doing The Obvious Thing Day nears, for me to take that victory lap.
