Quotulatiousness

May 23, 2019

Those “theories of history”

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

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian starts off talking great-man versus vast-impersonal-forces-of-history then segues into passivity (not Severian’s, but the widespread use of the passive voice):

Lionel Royer (1852-1926). Vercingetorix jette ses armes aux pieds de Jules César (Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar)
The painting depicts the surrender of the Gallic chieftain after the Battle of Alesia (52 BC). The depiction of Gauls with long hair and mustaches is also called into question today. The horse is a Percheron, although at this time this breed was not in Gaul. The rectangular shield also does not accord with the time when they were mostly oval.
Musée CROZATIER du Puy-en-Velay. — http://www.mairie-le-puy-en-velay.fr/ via Wikimedia Commons.

Academics, of course, are all in on “social” explanations of historical phenomena. Being weak, ineffective people themselves, with no experience of life, the very idea of a Caesar frightens and repels them… so they construct theories of History in which it is impossible for a Caesar to exist. On this view, “social forces” (what they used to call “the relations of the means of production”) tore the Roman Republic apart; the Empire was its inevitable next stage. Assign whatever name you like to the Imperator — whether Caesar, Marius, Sulla, or Miles Gloriosus, he’s just the temporary face of the vast, impersonal social forces that control our fate. None of this “History is just the biographies of great men” for them!

The eggheads have a point, though, albeit not the one they think they’re making. The Roman elite’s social system was designed to produce a certain type of man. Whether Gaius Julius Caesar was personally the embodiment of that system, or a perversion of it, is irrelevant — the system was designed to produce men like Caesar, fellows with a very particular set of skills. Eggheads have never seen one, but anyone who has kicked around the world outside the ivory tower for a bit has met that type of guy. The skills themselves are fairly common, at least in embryo. Whether a potential Caesar becomes actual might well be merely a question of opportunity and scale.

A terrifying notion, that, when you look around the modern West. The one characteristic all effective elites have in common is the self-knowledge that they are the elite. The British, for instance, thought nothing of sending some 19 year old kid, whose slim formal education was mostly Latin and Greek, off to govern the Punjab. It worked, largely because that kid, whatever his defects of intellect and ability, had character, of the kind you just don’t get without a pedigree stretching back to Hastings.

Again, if you’ve ever met one of the horsey set you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, the most accessible American equivalents are the sons and grandsons of career army officers. Think of Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, as played by Gary Sinise in the movie. That kind of guy always completes the mission, or dies trying, because it’s simply unthinkable that he won’t. After five generations, West Point is in his DNA…

The early days of the S.A.S.

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Middle East, Military, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lindybeige
Published on 31 Oct 2017

One of the world’s most famous regiments was nearly disbanded after one disastrous mission.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige

I forgot to say that David Stirling was twenty-five years old when recovering from his injury and dreaming up the future SAS. Within two years, all the major airfields within 300 miles of the front had been raided by the SAS, some of them up to four times.

The camouflage used on the vehicles of the LRDG, and later the SAS, was rose pink and olive green, and by all accounts it worked very well.

Main sources: SAS Rogue Heroes by Ben Macintyre, Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean.

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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Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.

website: http://www.LloydianAspects.co.uk

The Supreme Court of Canada goes on a roadtrip

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Carpay explains why the Supreme Court’s junket in September isn’t a good idea:

While hearing two cases in Winnipeg rather than Ottawa is a friendly gesture, the Court’s choice of which groups to meet with – and not meet with – in Winnipeg is necessarily a political choice. If you thought the Court would meet with Ukrainians and Germans (Manitoba’s two largest non-English ethnic communities), prisoners, seniors, taxpayer groups and English language rights activists opposed to official bilingualism, you would be wrong.

In fact, the Court has announced that it will meet with “indigenous communities, the francophone community, the legal community, and students.” What message does this send to the Canadian public, which wants an impartial court deciding on aboriginal claims? What does meeting with the francophone community in Winnipeg say in relation to the Court hearing a case about minority language educational rights? And what if university tuition payments were at the heart of a case that came before the SCC, with its Justices having met only with students, but not with taxpayers?

As Canadians, the Supreme Court judges already interact with the public in their private lives, in Ottawa and elsewhere. One could reasonably assume that the nine lawyers appointed to this Court each meet individually with various people regularly, on the basis of friendship, shared interests, or family obligations. The people with whom any one judge meets over the course of a year would likely not form a perfect microcosm of Canadian society, in terms of race, religion, political views, income, and level of education. This is to be expected, and there is nothing wrong with it, because the personal connections formed by any one judge are not publicly endorsed by the Court. Not so for these meetings of “the Court” as a whole in Winnipeg, which is what makes the Court’s exclusion of many groups worrisome.

Chief Justice Wagner would no doubt respond to the above by saying that he and his colleagues will do their very best to decide all cases impartially, regardless of which groups they chose to meet with (and not meet with) in Winnipeg. And he would be right.

But that doesn’t solve the problem. The Court has made a political decision to meet with francophones, not English language rights activists; lawyers not prisoners; students not seniors; aboriginals not Germans or Ukrainians. In view of the ancient and centrally important legal maxim, “Not only must justice be done; justice must be seen to be done,” the Court should not be making these political decisions in the first place, in order to avoid even the appearance of possible bias.

It’s bad enough that the Prime Minister is seen to be putting a thumb on the scales of justice, but much worse if the highest court in the land is perceived to be doing the same thing.

Game of Theories: The Keynesians

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Marginal Revolution University
Published on 7 Nov 2017

When the economy is going through a recession, what should be done to ease the pain? And why do recessions happen in the first place? We’ll take a look at one of four major economic theories to find possible answers – and show why no theory provides a silver bullet.

QotD: “Prestige” TV shows

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

Just a bugaboo of mine: These “Prestige” TV show seem to think that a bore-you-to-tears pacing is a de facto marker of “quality writing and deep characterization,” and most TV critics aren’t hip enough to get the con. A lot of these shows’ very slow pace suggests to me they are being written with a target audience of people “multitasking” on the computer as they half-watch in mind. I guess when you’re mostly reading Instagram while the TV is on, you maybe don’t notice that nothing has happened in the past three minutes. And I guess if you’re one of the one-eye-on-tv-one-eye-on-twitter crowd, you need nothing to happen for long stretches, or else you’ll be missing important stuff.

Ace, “Does ‘Prestige TV’ Just Mean Slow, Tedious, Unpleasant and Dimly-Lit?”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2017-05-15.

May 22, 2019

Making a Hexagonal Bowl | Turning Tuesday

Filed under: Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Matt Estlea
Published on 21 May 2019

In this video, I have a go at making a hexagonal bowl and inadvertently end up making a lethal weapon.
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Support what I do by becoming a Patron! This will help fund new tools, equipment and cover my overheads. Meaning I can continue to bring you regular, high quality, free content. Thank you so much for your support! https://www.patreon.com/mattestlea
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See what tools I use here: https://kit.com/MattEstlea
My Website: http://www.mattestlea.com
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My name is Matt Estlea, I’m a 23 year old Woodworker from Basingstoke in England and my aim is to make your woodworking less s***.

I come from 5 years tuition at Rycotewood Furniture Centre with a further 1 year working as an Artist in Residence at the Sylva Foundation. I now teach City and Guilds Furniture Making at Rycotewood as of September 2018.

I also had 5 years of experience working at Axminster Tools and Machinery where I helped customers with purchasing tools, demonstrated in stores and events, and gained extensive knowledge about a variety of tools and brands.

During the week, I film woodworking projects, tutorials, reviews and a viewer favourite ‘Tool Duel’ where I compare two competitive manufacturers tools against one another to find out which is best.

I like to have a laugh and my videos are quite fast paced BUT you will learn a lot, I assure you.

Lets go make a mess.

Climate change, no, climate crisis, no, climate catastrophe, no, we mean climate APOCALYPSE!!!

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The official marching orders for journalists now insist that the language to use around what was formerly “global warming” or “climate change” will now be described in starker, more frightening terms. Canada’s Liberal Party, under Justin Trudeau, has been virtue signalling for pretty much its entire term in office on the climate issue and with a fall election coming into view, the rhetoric will become more extreme and shrill. Jay Currie discusses climate change and the Canadian election:

I suspect this divide between people who think “doing something” about climate change (no matter how futile) and people who do not accept the urgency of dealing with something they really don’t believe in will inform politics in the West for the next few years. Most particularly, it will inform the next Canadian federal election.

The Liberal Party of Canada has been going all in on its “tax on carbon pollution” (a fine bit of wordsmithing managing to attach “carbon” to “pollution”). Led by the remarkably scolding Catherine McKenna, the Libs seem to think that purporting to “do something” about climate change is a vote winner. So McKenna tours the country speaking to uncritical school children and assorted environmentalists about how important having a “carbon tax” is. The Liberals tax will save the planet, ensure sea level rise stops (easy because sea level is not actually rising), save the Arctic ice cap (already saving itself, thank you), keep polar bears from extinction (also easy because virtually all polar bear populations are growing) and reduce or eliminate climate change “caused” weather events. Plus, Canada will honour its Paris Accord commitments (we won’t) and serve as a beacon to lesser nations like China and India in their efforts to combat climate change (as if).

The Liberals think that the fact that a carbon dioxide tax in Canada will have a rounding error effect on worldwide emissions and no detectable effect on world temperature does not matter politically. What matters politically is that the Liberals believe that there is a large constituency out there which urgently wants to “do something”.

The NDP is fully on board and, of course, the Greens have been banging the climate change drum forever. Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives seem to be on the fence. Like the Coalition in Australia, the Conservatives endorse the “climate change is a problem” line and very few are willing to challenge the underlying science or economics for fear of being branded uncool “climate change deniers”. But the Conservatives seem to be, prudently in my view, dragging their feet on “doing something” about CO2.

Political virtue signalling on the climate file is the easy part. All that is really required is the abandonment of any sort of scientific judgement (easy when you are told that all the scientists agree that climate change is real and primarily human caused) and policy skepticism (we don’t need a cost benefit analysis, this is an emergency!). The hard part occurs when you try to “do something”. Because doing something means that people are going to see their expenses rise without actually seeing (in any tangible way) any actual benefit. In fact, as Ontario’s wonderfully disastrous adventure in wind energy demonstrated, tax dollars can be wasted and consumer prices increased all without making any difference at all to the climate.

Hotchkiss 1914: A French and American WWI Heavy MG

Filed under: France, History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 19 Apr 2019

This Hotchkiss machine gun and its tripod are lot #2027 in the upcoming April 2019 Morphy auction:

https://www.forgottenweapons.com/hotc…

The gun that became the Hotchkiss 1914 and served as the bulwark of French and American forces in World War One was actually first designed and patented by an Austrian officer; Adolph von Odkolek. He took his idea to the Hotchkiss company in Paris hoping to arrange for them to produce it under license. The design was inspected by Laurence Benet (chief engineer at Hotchkiss) and Henri Mercie (Benet’s assistant), and they concluded that the gun was not suitable for production. However, the core concept in the patent – Odkolek’s gas piston system – was a worthy one and would allow production of machine guns to compete with Maxim and Colt without violating their existing patents. So Benet arranged to simply buy the patent outright for a flat fee, and then Hotchkiss set about redesigning the gun to be much better.

The result was the model 1897, an air-cooled, strip-fed heavy machine gun that was sold to many different nations. It was improved in 1900, and between the two models sales were made to Japan, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, China, Spain, Ethiopia, Finland, Greece, Guatemala, Luxembough, Norway, Sweden, Turkey, Portugal, and Venezuela in a variety of calibers. The French government also purchased some Hotchkiss guns, primarily for colonial use. For the bulk of the metropolitan army, France opted to design its own gun in the state arsenals (which was the Modele 1907 St Etienne gun; which is suspiciously like a Hotchkiss with the operating direction of the parts reversed to avoid patent infringement).

When World War One broke out, and the need for vast quantities of machine guns became apparent, the Hotchkiss was finally adopted on a large scale by France. The commercial 1900 pattern was revised slightly (a better barrel-locking system and replacement of the shoulder stock with a D-ring rear handle) and some 45,000 would be produced by 1918. The Hotchkiss would supplant the 1907 St Etienne over the course of the war, as it was a more reliable and less expensive design. It would go on to serve the French military through the end of World War Two, gaining a reputation as a gun of unparalleled simplicity and reliability.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

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QotD: A “conservative” argument for regulating social media companies

Filed under: Business, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There should be a high barrier for any company seeking to interfere with the marketplace of ideas in which the right of free correspondence is practiced.

Critics of regulating dot com monopolies have made valid points.

Regulating Google or Facebook as a public utility is dangerous. And their argument that giving government the power to control content on these platforms would backfire is sensible.

Any solution to the problem should not be based on expanding government control.

But there are two answers.

First, companies that engage in viewpoint discrimination in response to government pressure are acting as government agents. When a pattern of viewpoint discrimination manifests itself on the platform controlled by a monopoly, a civil rights investigation should examine what role government officials played in instigating the suppression of a particular point of view.

Liberals have abandoned the Public Forum Doctrine, once a popular ACLU theme, while embracing censorship. But if the Doctrine could apply to a shopping mall, it certainly applies to the internet.

In Packingham v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court’s decision found that, “A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen.”

The Packingham case dealt with government interference, but when monopolies silence conservatives on behalf of government actors, they are fulfilling the same role as an ISP that suspends a customer in response to a law.

When dot com monopolies get so big that being banned from their platforms effectively neutralizes political activity, press activity and political speech, then they’re public forums.

Second, rights are threatened by any sufficiently large organization or entity, not just government. Government has traditionally been the most powerful such organization, but the natural rights that our country was founded on are equally immune to every organization. Governments, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, exist as part of a social contract to secure these rights for its citizens.

Government secures these rights, first and foremost, against itself. (Our system effectively exists to answer the question of who watches the watchers.) But it also secures them against foreign powers, a crisis that the Declaration of Independence was written to meet, and against domestic organizations, criminal or political, whether it’s the Communist Party or ISIS, that seek to rob Americans of their rights.

A country in which freedom of speech effectively did not exist, even though it remained a technical right, would not be America. A government that allowed such a thing would have no right to exist.

Only a government whose citizens enjoy the rights of free men legally justifies is existence.

If a private company took control of all the roads and closed them to conservatives every Election Day, elections would become a mockery and the resulting government would be an illegitimate tyranny.

That’s the crisis that conservatives face with the internet.

Daniel Greenfield, “Americans Paid for the Internet, We Deserve Free Speech On It”, Sultan Knish, 2019-05-16.

May 21, 2019

Armoured Vehicles of the Invasion of France 1940, by The Chieftain – WW2 Special

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, Technology, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published on 20 May 2019

The Chieftain takes you on an extensive walkthrough of the armoured vehicles used by both sides during the German invasion of France in 1940.

The Chieftain’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheChief…

The Brexit Party may be getting dirty foreign money! Call out the plod!

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Guardian, totally neutral and disinterested journalists report on former Labour PM Gordon Brown’s call to investigate where the Brexit Party is getting its funding from:

The Electoral Commission is under mounting pressure to launch an investigation into the funding of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party because of concerns that its donation structure could allow foreign interference in British democracy.

Before Thursday’s crucial European elections, Gordon Brown has written to the Electoral Commission calling on it to urgently examine whether the party has sufficient safeguards on its website to prevent the contribution of “dirty money”.

The former Labour prime minister will use a speech in Glasgow on Monday to say an investigation into the Brexit party’s finances is urgent and essential.

“Nigel Farage says this election is about democracy. Democracy is fatally undermined if unexplained, unreported and thus undeclared and perhaps under the counter and underhand campaign finance – from whom and from where we do not know – is being used to influence the very elections that are at the heart of our democratic system,” he will say, according to pre-released extracts.

As Tim Worstall points out:

It’s actually an entire 13 paragraphs later that we get to the meat of the matter:

    Only donations over £500 have to be declared under British law.

The Brexit Party is obeying every jot and tittle of electoral and fundraising law. This is the very system that the federast establishment set up itself. But, you know, the wrong people are succeeding under it so aspertions must be cast.

And guess what? The Electoral Commission isn’t going to get anything done by Thursday. Not even to be able to confirm that the law is being obeyed as it should be. But we’ve managed to get the propaganda out there that Nigel’s posse are bought by the Russians and that’s the point of it all anyway.

You might think me a little cynical here. But sadly I’m not. When I was working for Ukip the Times – Sam Coates it was – announced that we simply weren’t going to contest the next election. No reason given, no analysis performed, an apology of any prominence never was forthcoming. Just a bit of disinformation dropped into the public conversation there.

That’s how the federasts play and any governance system that has to play that way isn’t one we desire to be a part of, is it?

The Hell with the EU.

Of course, dirty anonymous foreign money sources can fund other groups too.

Warlocks and Warriors – Russian Myth – Extra Mythology

Filed under: History, Russia — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 20 May 2019

Join the Patreon community! http://bit.ly/EMPatreon

When a soldier returns home from the battlefield, he finds the townspeople in fear of a warlock — but the solider wants to learn more about this fellow. And (un?)fortunately, the warlock is all too happy to tell…

Four “youths” vandalize model railway show

Filed under: Britain, Law, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There don’t appear to be any details online about the four “youths” who were arrested then released, so I assume their anonymity is protected by a British equivalent of the “Young Offenders Act”. The Market Deeping Model Railway Club describes the crime on their website:

We were all immensely upset to discover that overnight the school where our show was to be held had been broken into and almost everything totally ruined. This has devastated not only our own members but those of other clubs and the traders who had already set up shop. In the circumstances we felt we had no option other than to cancel the show.

Some of the models destroyed were irreplaceable and while we will of course be seeking to replace and rebuild wherever possible, this will take time and money. We have been overwhelmed by the many messages of support we have received together with offers of financial assistance. Please do help raise funds via our Just Giving page.

Click the image to go to their Just Giving fundraising page.

More on the incident from Deepings Nub News:

Bill Sowerby, Market Deeping Model Railway Club exhibition manager, told Deepings Nub News: “I arrived at 7.30am to be met by one of our members who told me the terrible news.

“Four of the layouts were completely trashed – two of our club’s, one privately owned and one from St Neots club.

“Four demonstrator stands and one for Bourne U3A stall, which would have raised funds for their organisation, was also smashed.

“Fortunately five other layouts in another room were undamaged and we had nine more left to install early this morning.

“It’s really hurtful for us all, not just because of the thousands of pounds we have lost in income – we were expecting between 400 and 500 visitors – and have paid out a lot of money to put on what is the club’s main fundraising event. Demonstrators and trade stands have also lost income.

“But it’s also the time and effort that members put into building the layouts. The St Neots layout took 25 years to construct and our Woodcroft layout took 26 years and involved more than 100 people over those years spending thousands of hours.

“Woodcroft will be repaired, but it’s so sad because a large number of the people who dedicated their time to build it are no longer with us. It has real sentimental importance to the club.

“Although our Knowl End – a children’s layout – was completely destroyed.”

Tips for Cleaner Miter Saw Cuts

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

WoodworkersJournal
Published on 8 Oct 2015

Eliminate tearout and take your saw’s cutting performance to the next level quickly and easily.

Visit our website for the best woodworking projects and lessons:
http://www.woodworkersjournal.com/

QotD: Measuring up to the presidency … or, perhaps, down

Filed under: Government, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… let’s just look at the presidents of my lifetime: JFK: Adulterer, drug user, made his brother (!) Attorney General, shady mafia connections, stole election. LBJ: Adulterer, much cruder than Trump, started Vietnam War. Nixon: Honestly, better than LBJ but the source of the term “Nixonian.” Ford: Nice guy, failed president. Carter: Nice guy, failed president. Reagan: The GOP gold standard, but a multiply-divorced Hollywood actor whose administration was marked by nearly as much scandal-drama as Trump’s. (Just look up Justice Gorsuch’s mother). George HW: Nice guy, but longtime adulterer and failed president. Bill Clinton: I mean, come on. George W. Bush: Personal rectitude in office, though he’s been a bit of a dick since Trump beat his brother. Iraq War thing didn’t turn out too well. Mediocre judicial appointments and little attention to domestic reforms. Gave us TSA. Obama: Far more scandals, and far more abuse of power, than Trump. And does French forget that Trump was running against Hillary?

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, “I LIKE DAVID FRENCH, BUT THIS IS AHISTORICAL BULLSHIT”, Instapundit, 2019-04-20.

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