Quotulatiousness

December 19, 2019

Vive la Résistance! well, not really… French Resistance 1940 – WW2 – War Against Humanity 007

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

World War Two
Published 18 Dec 2019

Immediately after France is occupied by the Nazis in 1940, the French are divided about what to do; resist for collaborate? To put it mildly, it’s complicated.

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Written and Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced and Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson and Francis van Berkel
Edited by: Wieke Kapteijns
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by: Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/

Sources: Bundesarchiv, Mémorial de la Shoah
Icons via the Noun Project: collaboration by Pause08, protester by Blaise Sewell, Dove by Luis Prado, confused by Llisole

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

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

Spartacus Olsson
16 hours ago
In the aftermath of WW2, everyone was probably pretty tired of the whole tragedy, and ready to just move on. Many of the people that I have met that lived through the war didn’t like talking about the war much. But somehow I had the privilege of getting many of the them that I met to open up and talk about it to me. Maybe not so much because of any personal quality I have other than being very persistent and curious — a pain in the neck is another way of putting it.

Anyway, we talked about many things, terrible things, great things, sad, and happy stories. But there was one thing I never heard anybody talk about, and that was indecision. Fear and regret, yes — everyone spoke of that, but not indecision. There was always an undertone of manifest destiny or complete meaninglessness.

But, when you think about it, how could you not be indecisive when faced with this kind of calamity? How can you not wonder if this is destiny, or just bad luck? How can you not be shocked into a stupor, at least at first? And even if you’re an ideologically convinced partisan or combatant, how do you know for sure what the right thing to do is? Well, when you start looking into it all, those questions were pretty much what gripped France in 1940 after the sudden, tragic loss of independence.

I think that indecision is not something we want to remember, perhaps we shouldn’t if we want to stay our course, perhaps we’re wired not to, so that we can focus better on what we finally decide. But for others who want to learn from our mistakes, and our successes — it is in the moment of indecision that we display our thinking, our reasoning, the true origin of our cause.

I should also tell you that I grew up in France, so this is in many ways the story of the adults around me when I was a child.

Sir Humphrey’s rebuttal to Sir Max on the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers

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

In the Times last weekend, Sir Max Hastings spent some time and effort to disparage the Royal Navy for commissioning the two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers and trotting out arguments against carriers that echo the criticisms of the cancelled CVA-01 program of the 1960s. Sir Humphrey characterizes Sir Max’s article as “ranting angrily about how the UK is an irrelevance now and how we don’t actually have any military power.”

HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08) and HMS Prince of Wales (R09) at Portsmouth in December 2019.

Maybe it’s a generational thing and the fact that for the few remaining, and increasingly less relevant commentators of Sir Max’s elderly generation of OAPs, perhaps memories of their childhood and a sense of national malaise in the late 1940s and 50s has shaped their perception of the world today. The problem is that their view is utterly disconnected from reality, and their approach seems to be best characterised as to answer any question as “the UK is irrelevant, whats the question again”?

It is set against this backdrop of this article that it is worth reviewing why the Carrier force remains so relevant, and why the UK, despite the wishes of Sir Max remains relevant and credible globally. Carriers matter in simple terms because they allow the UK to embark an airwing, and military force, that can sail around the world on a self-sustaining basis and arrive ready to operate at a time and place of the British Governments choosing.

[…]

We like to permanently beat ourselves up as if we’re somehow failures, yet when push comes to shove, we seem to be remarkably good at not being failures. There is always a UK capability or asset that we can help with or support. Only this week the RAF sent an A400M to conduct search and rescue operations in Chile, while at the other end of the world, it finished providing air defence to Iceland with a Typhoon detachment. When disasters occur globally, the UK is always ready to send aid and assist, while in a crisis there is usually a UK military asset nearby that can help.

This reach is in part due to the fact that the UK has invested heavily in jointery and “fusion” bringing together departments and assets to work in a far more coherent and joined up way than most nations. As a nation we enjoy considerably more influence, reach and access than we think, and are usually at the cutting edge of efforts to improve capabilities too.

It is particularly frustrating then to see attacks on the existence of the carrier force in a way that treats this priceless national asset as if it is some kind of toy for the Royal Navy. It smacks of a total lack of understanding about how defence works in support of wider national security, and how joined up things really are these days.

The carrier is a national investment designed to provide a wide plethora of capabilities to support and defend the nation, and its allies, for decades to come. To see it purely through the prism of a myopic lens and an overt and tedious hatred of the Royal Navy for reasons more probably linked to events of the 1980s than any fact is fairly sad to observe.

To be honest this piece seems to mark yet another part of the opening of hostilities in the SDSR campaign. It seems intended to cause debate about the value of carriers and gently reinforce the message that somehow money should go elsewhere – ignoring the fact that this money has now been spent.

Its hard to understand what the thinking is here, but at its heart it feels like this is a piece intended to condition the public into thinking “the Navy and to a lesser extent the RAF has had lots of money wasted on it, lets go be nice to the Army for a change”. Such a view though is utterly removed from the reality of how defence works, but it feels as if it is intended to reinforce stereotypes that wouldn’t hold up to any scrutiny.

Modern Classics Summarized: A Christmas Carol

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

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 21 Dec 2018

Have a holly, jolly christmas! Spend time with your family, eat tons of good food, and don’t forget to ponder the looming specter of your mortality and the worth of how you’ve spent your fleeting existence!

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Repost – “An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice”

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

Hard to refute xkcd on Christmas music:

Machine Gun Terminology – LMG, MMG, SAW, LSW, HMG, GPMG

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Dec 2017

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Today we will look at the various different categories of machine guns — what makes them, why they exist, and what their place in military history is. Specifically …

Automatic Rifle: Shoulder or hip fired, limited magazine capacity, minimal sustained fire capacity. Examples: M1918 BAR, Chauchat.

LMG: Magazine fed, rifle caliber, bipod fired. Examples: Bren, Madsen, Lewis.

HMG: Belt fed, usually water cooled, minimal portability, fired from tripod only. Examples: Maxim, Vickers, Hotchkiss 1914. Evolved into guns of caliber 12.7mm – 20mm, like the M2 and DShK.

MMG: Air cooled, tripod fired only, belt fed. Examples: Browning 1919A4, SG-43.

GPMG: Bipod or tripod fired, belt fed, rifle caliber, quick-change barrel. Examples: MG42, PKM, M240.

SAW/LSW: Intermediate caliber, magazine fed, bipod fired. Examples: L86A1, FN Minimi, RPK.

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

QotD: The “fitness club” scam

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

As any good cult leader knows, the real money in running a cult doesn’t come from the cultists themselves. It comes from the hangers-on who buy your products and vote for you. Think of it like the gym. Notice how all the gyms these days are called “fitness clubs?” It’s a brilliant marketing move, straight out of the UFO cult playbook. Gyms fitness clubs don’t make their money off the small hard core of people who work out every day. Rather, it’s the people who sign up — who join the club — but never actually go.

Here’s how you talk yourself into a gym fitness club membership: “I need to get in shape. So I’ll buy a club membership. That way, I can go whenever I want.” In Festinger’s taxonomy […] you’re at step 2: You’ve taken a significant action in line with your belief. Gyms fitness clubs add a further refinement of late-20th century marketing, in that they offer you a yuuuuge “discount” off the outrageously-high signup fee, but the underlying psychological process is the same.

And now you’re set up for the disconfirmations — that is, all those times you think about going to the gym, but don’t actually go. Objectively you’re wasting your money, but psychologically you’re committed to the idea of yourself as someone who does “fitness” — you’re in a fitness club, after all! And since everyone you know is doing the same thing — fully 75% of conversations one overhears at Starbucks are soccer moms griping about how they need to work out, but just can’t find the time — you’re in, all the way, […].

The “climate change” scam works the same way. When she’s on the campaign trail pimping the “Green New Deal,” Fauxcahontas Warren knows she doesn’t have to pitch it to the eco-freaks; they’d vote for her no matter what. She has to pitch it to the normies, fitness club-style. That’s where the “climate change” nomenclature really pays off. It’s shockingly easy to get people convinced of a lunatic belief. All you have to do is a) get ’em early, and b) overload them with “evidence.” You know the drill: These days, we’re lectured practically from birth that we must Do Something! for The Environment! … and the “evidence” for this, of course, is the ceaseless, dramatic variation in daily temperature the un-indoctrinated call “weather,” plus all the other dramatic variations in climate that didn’t happen. So long as you pitch it with complete self-righteousness, people with the critical thinking skills of five year olds will fall in line every time.

Then all you have to do is get people to take action … which the government, in all its wonderful helpfulness, has already done: Low-flow toilets, those stupid twisty “light” bulbs, toilet paper that either shreds on contact with skin or sandpapers your asshole off, plastic straw bans, mandatory recycling, you name it. And I’m sure y’all realize by now that the fact that none of this stuff actually works is a feature, not a bug. Since it’s the disconfirmations that get you. That’s the pitch to the normies — you obviously care about “the environment,” in the same way you care about “fitness.” Just as the “fitness club” owners will happily keep cashing your checks while you remain a diabetic lardass, so Fauxcahontas will keep cashing your checks while the weather stubbornly remains the weather …

Severian, “What Happens if the UFO Actually Comes?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-25.

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