Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2019

The Three Kingdoms – Yellow Turban Rebellion – Extra History – #1

Filed under: Books, China, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published on 9 May 2019

This series is brought to you by Total War: THREE KINGDOMS, a brand new strategy game set during this time period. https://store.steampowered.com/app/77…

Fierce duels. Great armies. Love, brotherhood and betrayal. These are the images conjured when we speak of the Three Kingdoms.

Liu Bei, Zhang Fei, Guan Yu — these were the men who would define the Three Kingdoms period. Even though the actual history of this period is often conflated with the events of the historical novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, there was still a lot of compelling drama and intrigue we can explore — let’s delve in to the Yellow Turban Rebellion, which really did happen!

Thanks to Jordan Martin for the guest art! https://www.jordanwmartin.com/

Join us on Patreon! http://bit.ly/EHPatreon

Jonathan Haidt – Social media has altered a fundamental constant of the universe

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Katie Herzog attended the first Heterodox Academy conference and reports on Haidt, the academy’s founder, and other attendees at the event:

Jonathan Haidt at the Miller Center of Public Affairs in Charlottesville, Virginia on 19 March, 2012.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

I told three people that Jonathan Haidt will be speaking in Seattle this week. One is a left-leaning university professor, another is an apolitical meditation teacher, and the last is a conservative talk radio host. Despite the chasm between their personal politics, they were all equally enthusiastic to hear Haidt speak. He seems to have that effect on people, and is one of the rare political thinkers who manages to both appeal to (and occasionally enrage) people across the political spectrum.

A professor of social psychology at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Haidt is also the author of best-selling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which he published with First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff last year. That book grew out of an article of the same name that the duo first published in the Atlantic in 2015. As anyone who was paying attention back then may recall, the article made quite a splash, and it brought some emerging trends at university campuses into the public consciousness, including the rise of trigger warnings, deplatforming speakers, and university administrators’ attempts to protect students from any perceived harm. The article, and the subsequent book, didn’t exactly make Haidt popular in some hyper-left circles, and Haidt is occasionally accused of being a conservative in disguise. What he actually is, is a centrist, which gives him a perspective outside the typically left/right binary, and much of his recent work is about tribalism and division in the U.S. It’s a trend he thinks is getting worse.

[…]

“If you are in a university that puts you into interaction with diverse ideas, that makes you smarter,” Haidt says. “You can solve more problems. You become a more critical thinker. The more you hang out with people who think like you, especially if they enforce orthodoxy, the lower your IQ gets.”

In other words, only engaging with ideas you already support can actually make you dumber. It can also damage your cause. As an example, Haidt sites student attempts to deplatform both outside speakers and faculty on campuses over the last few years. Video of protests at schools like Evergreen State were widely shared on conservative networks, and while the students may have seen themselves as warriors in the fight for social justice, those who don’t already support their ideals were more likely to see hysterical students screaming at befuddled adults. The backlash was inevitable. “The antics on campus did a lot, I think, to elect Donald Trump,” Haidt says. “Most people on the left have not seen those videos but most people on the right have seen them. And so even if you think it’s virtuous to always be fighting, in the long run, you are harming your own side.”

In an effort to reverse the trend of ideological homogeneity on campus, Haidt founded the Heterodox Academy, an organization that advocates for universities to embrace viewpoint diversity (even, yes, when those viewpoints are conservative). Last year, they hosted the first Heterodox Academy Open Minds Conference in New York, which I attended. (Full disclosure: I moderated a panel, for which I was compensated.)

The conference was remarkable: Everyone I spoke to seemed to have some story about what made them first see that the world isn’t cleanly broken up into good versus evil, from professors who’d been the subject of protests to journalists who’d been canceled. Still, this was a conference mostly made up of academics and writers, and I doubt there was a single stereotypical Trump voter or social justice warrior in attendance. For the sake of viewpoint diversity this is probably a failure, but the organization still managed to bring together a crowd that included conservatives like Bret Stephens and liberals like Alice Dreger and libertarians like Kmele Foster all in one space. There were heated discussions, to be sure, but no one called for anyone else to be fired. This, I am sure, would be appalling to a certain subset of leftist Twitter, but as Haidt reminded me, social media may be loud, but it’s not representative. “We have to distinguish between the average and the visible anecdote,” he said. “This is another thing social media has done to us: We used to have a sense of the mood in a room or the mood in our social network, and now we have no idea.”

Still, he’s not optimistic that we’ll work our way out of these divisions, at least without significant disruption in the process. “Things feel so strange to me,” he said. “It feels as though a fundamental constant of the universe has been altered. I think social media has done that.”

Balkans, Bazookas, and Bunkers – WW2 – OOTF 002

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published on 9 May 2019

Out of the Foxholes is back to answer your questions about the war. In this episode, we take a look at anti-tank weaponry for infantry, the German defensive lines of the Westwall, the never-finished German aircraft-carrier Graf Zeppelin and the Balkans. The Chieftain, who has his own YouTube channel about tanks and armored vehicles, joins us to answer some of your technical questions. Do you have any questions of your own? You can submit them here: https://community.timeghost.tv/c/Out-…

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Join our Discord Server: https://discord.gg/D6D2aYN.
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Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

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
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns and Spartacus Olsson

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
Out of the Foxholes is back! While we can’t make this into a regular thing yet, releasing one on set days and stuff, we love doing them and will publish one whenever we find some time to make them. In this edition, The Chieftain joins us to tackle some of the technical questions we have received. Did you know that the Chieftain has made several special episodes about tanks and tactics leading up to World War Two on his own channel? You can find that right here: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheChieftainWoT
If you want to submit a question of your own, you can do that right here: https://community.timeghost.tv/c/Out-of-the-Foxholes-Qs

Please consider supporting us on Patreon, as this project is almost fully driven by the financial support we receive on there. You can find our Patreon page right here: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Cheers,
Joram

The “Euphemism Treadmill”

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

An older post by Stan Hingston on the urgent need of many people to demand others use their chosen euphemisms, especially when the word objected to is itself already a euphemism:

Stephen Pinker in his 2003 book The Blank Slate coined the name euphemism treadmill for the process whereby words introduced to replace an offensive word, over time become offensive themselves. A current example of this is mental retardation.

The word itself comes from the Latin retardare meaning “to make slow, delay or hinder”.

Retardation was first used in the psychiatric sense in 1895, and eventually replaced older terms – once neutral themselves – like moron, imbecile, idiot, feeble-minded and cretin. Each of these terms had a specific meaning as to severity and age of development (cretinism for example referred to severe congenital hypothyroidism) but these meanings often differed between countries. The new term was subdivided into degrees of mild, moderate and severe mental retardation. These new technical terms were no doubt welcomed by those affected, as the previous names were being used as derogatory insults (as indeed they still are).

By the 1960s when I was in grade school, the same process had occurred with retardation. “Retard” was a common playground insult, as in “Look where yer goin’, ya retard!” To us at the time it was considered harmless fun (although I now recognize the potential to really hurt someone who did have an intellectual disability). In Grade 7 my buddy Doug and I did impersonations of “retarded chipmunks” in which we tucked our lower lip inside our upper front teeth and crossed our eyes.

Since that time retardation has been gradually replaced by a variety of more acceptable (at least for now) terms including mentally handicapped, mentally impaired, mentally challenged, intellectually challenged, intellectually disabled, learning disabled, and developmentally disabled. The last two of course are broader terms that include other conditions not covered by the meaning of mental retardation.

The problem of technically defined terms being appropriated by “the masses” and misused is not soluble by professional bodies, and given the flexibility of the English language, probably not even by a French-style “official language commission” empowered with all the majesty of law: it would be a massive waste of time and effort. Of course, “massive waste of time and effort” is pretty much baked into the bones of government agencies…

Inside the Chieftain’s Hatch. M151 Series

Filed under: History, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The_Chieftain
Published on 6 Apr 2019

A fun, and rather dangerous, little softskin which will easily fit in your garage.

QotD: The Coolidge Effect

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

Behavioral endocrinologist Frank A. Beach first mentioned the term “Coolidge effect” in publication in 1955, crediting one of his students with suggesting the term at a psychology conference. He attributed the neologism to:

    … an old joke about Calvin Coolidge when he was President … The President and Mrs. Coolidge were being shown [separately] around an experimental government farm. When [Mrs. Coolidge] came to the chicken yard she noticed that a rooster was mating very frequently. She asked the attendant how often that happened and was told, “Dozens of times each day.” Mrs. Coolidge said, “Tell that to the President when he comes by.” Upon being told, the President asked, “Same hen every time?” The reply was, “Oh, no, Mr. President, a different hen every time.” President: “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”

The joke appears in a 1978 book (A New Look at Love, by Elaine Hatfield and G. William Walster, p. 75), citing an earlier source (footnote 19, Chapter 5).

“Coolidge Effect”, Wikipedia.

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